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THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my up-thrust wrist

The Man
Who Couldn't Sleep

By ARTHUR STRINGER

AUTHOR OF

"The Prairie Wife," Etc.

With Frontispiece
By FRANK SNAPP

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Bobbs Merrill Company

T2k5Ylb

Printed in the United States of America

To Harvey, of the dome-like pate,
The dreamy eye, the Celtic wit

And kindly heart, I dedicate

This blithe romance conceived and writ

By one of that triumvirate

Who knew Defeat, yet conquered it.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I Running Out of Pay-Dirt

II The Ox-Blood Vase

III The Stolen Wheel-Code

IV The Open Door

V The Man from Medicine Hat

VI The Irreproachable Butler

VII The Panama Gold Chests

VIII The Dummy-Chucker

IX A Rialto Rain-Storm i .

X The Thumb-Tap Clue .

XI The Nile-Green Roadster

120

150

180

211

249

280

316

The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

CHAPTER I

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT

'THO begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and
■■■ thirty-three years old. For nine of those years
I have lived in New York. And by my friends in that
city I am regarded as a successful author.

There was a time when I even regarded myself in
much the same light. But that period is past. I
now have to face the fact that I am a failure. For
when a man is no longer able to write he naturally
can no longer be reckoned as an author.

I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well
known, I think, to explain that practically all of my
stories have been written about Alaska, Just why I
resorted to that far-off country for my settings is still
more or less a mystery to me. Perhaps it was merely
because of its far-offness. Perhaps it was because
the editors remembered that I came from the land of
the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadian would
be most at home in writing about the Frozen North.
At any rate, when I romanced about the Yukon and
its ice-bound trails they bought my stories, and asked
for more.

And I gave them more. I gave them blood-red
fiction about gun-men and claim-jumpers and Siwash

2 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

queens and salmon fisheries. I gave them supermen
of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarl-
ing, always snarling, at their foes. I gave them ora-
torical young engineers with clear-cut features and
sinews of steel, battling against the forces of hyper-
borean evil. I gave them fist-fights that caused
my books to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries
3ret brought in telegrams from motion-picture direct-
ors for first rights. I gave them enough gun-play to
shoot Chilcoot Pass into the middle of the Pacific,
and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the
Eye-Socket School, and during the three-hundred-
night run of my melodrama, The Pole Raiders, even
beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarily
stalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a
flannel shirt very much open at the throat, with a cow-
hide holster depending from my Herculean waist-line
and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protruding
from the open top of that belted holster. My pub-
lishers spoke of me, for business reasons, as the In-
terpreter of the Great Northwest. And I exploited
that territory with the industry of a badger. In my
own way, I mined Alaska. And it brought me in a
very respectable amount of pay-dirt.

But I knew nothing about Alaska I had never
even seen the country. I "crammed up" on it, of
course, the same as we used to cram up for a third-
form examination in Latin grammar. I perused the
atlases and sent for governmental reports, and pored
over the R. N. W. M. P. Blue Books, and gleaned a
hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breed

RUNNING OUT OF FAY-DIRT 3

villains from a telephone-directory for the city of
Montreal. But I knew no more about Alaska than
a Fiji Islander knows about the New York Stock Ex-
change. And that was why I could romance so freely,
so magnificently, about it!

I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because
I had never seen the real thing flow — except in the
case of my little niece, when her tonsils had been re-
moved and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me
out of the surgery and given me a drink of ice- water,
after telling me it would be best to keep my head as
low as possible until I was feeling better. As for
firearms, I abhorred them. I never shot off an air-
rifle without first shutting my eyes. I never picked up
a duck-gun without a wince of aversion. So I was
able to do wonderful things with firearms, on paper.
And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined,
I was able to work miracles. I gave a whole continent
goose-flesh, so many times a season. And the conti-
nent seemed to enjoy it, for those airy essays in iron
and gore were always paid for, and paid for at higher
and higher rates.

While this was taking place, something even more
important was taking place, something which finally
brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood herself.
It was accident more than anything else, I think, that
first launched me in what is so indefinitely and often
so disparagingly known as society. Society, as a rule,
admits only the lions of my calling across its sacred
portals. And even these lions, I found, were accepted
under protest or the wing of some commendable effort

4 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

for charity, and having roared their little hour, were
let pass quietly out to oblivion again. But I had been
lucky enough to bring letters to the Peytons and to
the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will
be honest enough to confess, had been foolish enough
to like me.

So from the first I did my best to live up to
those earlier affiliations. I found myself passed on,
from one mysteriously barricaded seclusion to the
other. The tea-hour visit merged into the formal
dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more
formal box at the Horse-Show, and then a call to
fill up a niche at the Metropolitan on a Caruso-night,
or a vacancy for an Assembly Dance at Sherry's, or a
week at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was
good.

I worked hard to keep up my end of the game. But
I was an impostor, of course, all along the line. I
soon saw that I had to prove more than acceptable; I
had also to prove dependable. That I was a writer
meant nothing whatever to those people. They had
scant patience with the long-haired genius type. That
went down only with musicians. So I soon learned
to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and
my necktie inside my coat-lapels. I also learned to
use my wits, and how to key my talk up to dowager
or down to debutante, and how to be passably amus-
ing even before the champagne course had arrived.
I made it a point to remember engagements and an-
niversaries, and more than once sent flowers and
Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for. Even

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 5

my pourboircs to butlers and footmen and maids stood
a matter, in those earlier days, for much secret and
sedulous consideration.

But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end. I
liked those large and orderly houses. I liked the
quiet-mannered people who lived in them. I liked
looking at life with their hill-top unconcern for triviali-
ties. I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler
fellow-workers who haunted the neighborhood theaters
and the red-inkeries of Greenwich Village, and orated
Socialism and blank-verse poems to garret audiences,
and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blink-
ers with big round lenses, and went in joyous and cara-
mel-eating groups to the "rush" seats at Rigoletto. I
was accepted, as I have already tried to explain, as an
impecunious but dependable young bachelor. And
I suppose I could have kept on at that role, year after
year, until I developed into a foppish and somewhat
threadbare old beau. But about this time I was giv-
ing North America its first spasms of goose-flesh with
my demigod type of Gibsonian engineer who fought
the villain until his flannel shirt was in rags and then
shook his fist in Nature's face when she dogged him
with the Eternal Cold. And there was money in
writing for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and
about battling claw to claw and fang to fang, and
about eye-sockets without any eyes in them. My in-
come gathered like a snow-ball. And as it gathered I
began to feel that I ought to have an establishment —
not a back-room studio in Washington Square, nor a
garret in the Village of the Free-Versers, nor a mere

6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP.

apartment in the West Sixties, nor even a duplex
overlooking Central Park South. I wanted to be
something more than a number. I wanted a house, a
house of my own, and a cat- footed butler to put a
hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of Sevres on my
mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip
of red carpet across when the landaulets and the
limousines rolled up to my door.

So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house
in Gramercy Square. It was old-fashioned and sedate
and unpretentious to the passing eye, but beneath that
somewhat somber shell nested an amazingly rich kernel
of luxuriousness. It was good form ; it was unbeliev-
ably comfortable, and it was not what the climber
clutches for. The cost of even a nine-year claim on
it rather took my breath away, but the thought of
Alaska always served to stiffen up my courage.

It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska
in those days, for after I had acquired my house I
also had to acquire a man to run it, and then a couple
of other people to help the man who helped me, and
then a town car to take me back and forth from it,
and then a chauffeur to take care of the car, and then
the service-clothes for the chauffeur, and the thousand
and one unlooked for things, in short, which confront
the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling
too much a lord of creation.

Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a
gem of the first water. He moved about as silent as
a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle. He could be
ubiquitous and self -obliterating at one and the same

RUNNING OUT OF PA\-DIRT 7

time. He was meekness incarnate, and yet he could
coerce me into a predetermined line of conduct as
inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car along its
predestined line of traffic. He was, in fact, much
more than a butler. He was a valet and a chef de
cuisine and a lord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-
agent and a body-guard and a benignant-eyed old god-
father all in one. The man babied me. I could see
that all along. But I was already an overworked
and slightly neurasthenic specimen, even in those days,
and I was glad enough to have that masked and silent
Efficiency always at my elbow. There were times, too,
when his activities merged into those of a trained
nurse, for when I smoked too much he hid away my
cigars, and when I worked too hard he impersonally
remembered what morning horseback riding in the
park had done for a former master of his. And when
I drifted into the use of chloral hydrate, to make me
sleep, that dangerous little bottle had the habit of
disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicably disappear-
ing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.

There was just one thing in which Benson disap-
pointed me. That was in his stubborn and unreason-
able aversion to Latreille, my French chauffeur. For
Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson him-
self. He understood his car, he understood the traffic
rules, and he understood what I wanted of him.
Latreille was, after a manner of speaking, a find of
my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I had met
the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a
card to stroll through Headquarters and inspect the

8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

machinery of the law. I had happened on Latreille as
he was being measured and "mugged" in the Identifi-
cation Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps
taking his cranial measurements. The intelligence of
the man interested me; the inalienable look of re-
spectability in his face convinced me, as a student of
human nature, that he was not meant for any such
fate or any such environment. And when I looked
into his case I found that instinct had not been amiss.
The unfortunate fellow had been "framed" for a car-
theft of which he was entirely innocent. He ex-
plained all this to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes.
And circumstances, when I looked into them, bore
out his statements. So I visited the Commissioner,
and was passed on to the Probation Officers, from
whom I caromed off to the Assistant District- Attorney,
who in turn delegated me to another official, who was
cynical enough to suggest that the prisoner might pos-
sibly be released if I was willing to go to the extent
of bonding him. This I very promptly did, for I was
now determined to see poor Latreille once more a free
man.

Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by
saving me seven hundred dollars when I bought my
town car — though candor compels me to admit that I
later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, and not
a product fresh from the factory, as I had anticipated.
But Latreille was proud of that car, and proud of his
position, and I was proud of having a French chauf-
feur, though my ardor was dampened a little later
on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailing

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 9

from the Bois de Boulogne and the Avenue de la Pair,
originated in the slightly less splendid suburbs of Three
Rivers, up on the St. Lawrence.

But my interest in Latreille about this time became
quite subsidiary, for something much more important
than cars happened to me. I fell in love. I fell in
love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love
with a girl who could have thrown a town car into
the Hudson every other week and never have missed
it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful; but she
was dishearteningly wealthy. With all those odious
riches of hers, however, she was a terribly honest and
above-board girl, a healthy-bodied, clear-eyed, prac-
tical-minded, normal-living New York girl who in
her twenty-two active years of existence had seen
enough of the world to know what was veneer and
what was solid, and had seen enough of men to de-
mand mental camaraderie and not "squaw- talk" from
them.

I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American
Art Galleries, where we chanced to bid against each
other for an old Italian table-cover, a sixteenth-century
blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon. Mary bid
me down, of course. I lost my table-cover, and with
it I lost my heart. When I met her at the Obden-
Belponts, a week later, she confessed that I'd rather
been on her conscience. She generously offered to
hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened
to be grieving over its loss. But I told her that all I
asked for was a chance to see it occasionally. And
occasionally I went to see it. I also saw its owner, who

io THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

became more wonderful to me, week by week. Then
I lost my head over her. That aphcresis was so com-
plete that I told Mary what had happened, and asked
her to marry me.

Mary was very practical about it all. She said she
liked me, liked me a lot. But there were other things
to be considered. We would have to wait. I had
my work to do — and she wanted it to be big work,
gloriously big- work. She wouldn't even consent to a
formal engagement. But we had an "understanding."
I was sent back to my work, drunk with the memory
of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wist-
fully entreating eyes searching my face for something
which she seemed unable to find there.

That work of mine which I went back to, however,
seemed something very flat and meager and trivial.
And this, I realized, was a condition which would
never do. The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling
now more briskly than ever. I had lapsed into more
or less luxurious ways of living; I had formed ex-
pensive tastes, and had developed a fondness for
antiques and Chinese bronzes and those objets d'art
which are never found on the bargain-counter. I
had outgrown the Spartan ways of my youth when
I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly
on a studio-couch in a top-floor room. And more and
more that rapacious ogre known as Social Obligation
had forged his links and fetters about my movements.
More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up.
What should have been a recreation had become al-
most a treadmill. I was a pretender, and had my pre-

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT n

tense to sustain. I couldn't afford to be "dropped." I
had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate.
I couldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a no-
body. So instead of trying to keep up one end, I
tried to keep up two. I continued to bob about the
fringes of the Four Hundred. And I continued to
cling hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, glori-
ously big work.

But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually
done by lonely men, living simply and quietly, and
dwelling aloof from the frivolous side-issues of life,
divorced from the distractions of a city which seemed
organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And
I could see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska
was running thinner and thinner.

It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with
my old friend Pip Conners, just back to civilization
after fourteen long years up in the Yukon. That
dinner of ours together was memorable. It was one
of the mile-stones of my life. I wanted to furbish up
my information on that remote corner of the world,
which, in a way, I had preempted as my own. I
wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed in-
spiration. And I was glad to feel Pip's horny hand
close fraternally about mine.

"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admi-
ration, "you're a wonder."

I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at
a loss to discern its inspiration.

"You mean — this?" I asked, with a casual hand-
wave about that Gramercy Square abode of mine.

12 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort. "I mean those
stories of yours. I've read 'em all."

I blushed at this, blushed openly. For such com-
mendation from a man who knew life as it was, who
knew life in the raw, was as honey to my ears.

"Do you mean to say you could get them, up
titer e?" I asked, more for something to dissemble my
embarrassment than to acquire actual information.

"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-
sounding laugh, "they come through the mails about
the same as they'd come through the mails down
here. And folks even read them, now and then, when
the gun-smoke blows out of the valley!"

"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?"
I inquired, a little at sea as to his line of thought.

"It's not them that's wonderful, Witter. It's you.
I said you were a wonder. And you are."

"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip
of the honey no longer embarrassing my modesty.

"Witter, you're, a wonder to get azvay with it!" was
Pip's solemnly intoned reply.

"To get away with it?" I repeated.

"Yes ; to make it go down ! To get 'em trussed and
gagged and hog-tied ! To make 'em come and eat out
of your hand and then holler for more! For I've
been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nice
comfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know
the country. I know how folks live up there, and
what the laws are. And it may strike you as queer,
friend-author, but folks up in that district are uncom-
monly like folks down here in the States. And in the

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 13

Klondike and this same British Yukon there is a Fire-
arms Act which makes it against the law for any
civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carried
out. Fact is, there's no need for a gun. And even
if you did smuggle one in, the Mounted Police would
darned soon take it away from you !"

I sat staring at him.

"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped. "And
all those novels about — "

"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the
genial-eyed Pip. "You can fool all the people all the
time! You've done it. And you keep on doing it.
You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of their pants
pocket before they know they've gone by-by. Why,
you've even got 'em tranced off in the matter of every-
day school-geography. You've had some of those hero-
guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, and
on a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper.
And if that ain't genius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in
a reading-book!"

That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right,
but not after the manner I had expected. For as
I sat there in a cold sweat of apprehension crowned
with shame, Pip Conners told me many things about
Alaska and the Klondike. He told me many things
that were new to me, dishearteningly, discouragingly,
devitalizingly new to me. Without knowing it, he
poignarded me, knifed me through and through. With-
out dreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me.
He left me a hollow and emptv mask of an author.
He left me a homeless exile, with the iron gates of

14 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy
Land of Romance, a Promised Land of untrammelled
and care-free imaginings.

That was my first sleepless night.

I said nothing to Pip. I said nothing to any one.
I held that vulture of shame close in my arms and
felt its unclean beak awling into my vitals. I tried
to go back to my work, next day, to lose myself in
creation. But it was like seeking consolation be-
side a corpse. For me, Alaska was killed, killed
forever. And blight had fallen on more than my
work. It had crept over my very world, the world
which only the labor of my pen could keep orderly and
organized. The city in which I had seemed to sit a
conqueror suddenly lay about me a flat and monoto-
nous tableland of ennui, as empty and stale as a circus-
lot after the last canvas-wagon has rumbled away.

I have no intention of making this recountal the
confessions of a neurasthenic. Nothing is further from
my aims than the inditing of a second City of Dread-
ful Night. But I began to worry. And later on I be-
gan to magnify my troubles. I even stuck to New York
that summer, for the simple reason that I couldn't
afford to go away. And it was an unspeakably hot
summer. I did my best to work, sitting for hours at
a time staring at a blank sheet of paper, set out like
tangle-foot to catch a passing idea. But not an idea
alighted on that square of spotless white. When
I tried new fields, knowing Alaska was dead, the
editors solemnly shook their heads and announced
that this new offering of mine didn't seem to have the

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 15

snap and go of my older manner. Then panic overtook
me, and after yet another white night I went straight
to Sanson, the nerve specialist, and told him I was
going crazy.

He laughed at me. Then he offhandedly tapped me
over and tried my reflexes and took my blood pressure
and even more diffidently asked me a question or two.
He ended up by announcing that I was as sound as a
dollar, whatever that may have meant, and suggested
as an afterthought that I drop tobacco and go in more
for golf.

That buoyed me up for a week or two. But Mary,
when she came in to town radiant and cool for
three days' shopping, seemed to detect in me a change
which first surprised and then troubled her. I was
bitterly conscious of being a disappointment to some-
body who expected great things of me. And to escape
that double-edged sword of mortification, I once again
tried to bury myself in my work. But I just as well
might have tried to bury myself in a butter-dish, for
there was no effort and no activity there to envelope
me. I was coerced into idleness, without ever having
acquired the art of doing nothing. For life with me
had been a good deal like boiling rice: it had to be
kept galloping to save it from going mushy. Yet
now the fire itself seemed out. And that prompted me
to sit and listen to my works, as the French idiom
expresses it, which is never a profitable calling for
a naturally nervous man.

The lee and the long of it was, as the Irish say, that
I went back to Doctor Sanson and demanded some-

1 6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

thing, in the name of God, that would give me a good
night's sleep. He was less jocular, this time. He told
me to forget my troubles and go fishing for a couple
of weeks.

I did go fishing, but I fished for ideas. And I got
scarcely a strike. To leave the city was now more
than ever out of the question. So for recreation I
had Latreille take me out in the car, when a feverish
thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account
for, drove me into daily violations of the traffic laws.
Twice, in fact, I was fined for this, with a curtly
warning talk from the presiding magistrate on the
second occasion, since the offense, in this case, was
complicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage.
Latreille, about this time, seemed uncannily conscious
of my condition. More and more he seemed to rasp
me on the raw, until irritation deepened into positive
dislike for the man.

When Mary came back to the city for a few days,
before going to the Virginia hills for the autumn, I
looked so wretched and felt so wretched that I de-
cided not to see her. I was taking veronal now, to
make me sleep, and with cooler weather I looked for
better rest and a return to work. But my hopes were
ill-founded. I came to dread the night, and the night's
ever-recurring battle for sleep. I lost my perspective
on things. And then came the crowning catastrophe,
the catastrophe which turned me into a sort of twen-
tieth-century Macbeth.

The details of that catastrophe were ludicrous
enough, and it had no definite and clear-cut outcome,

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 17

but its effect on my over-tensioned nerves was suffi-
ciently calamitous. It occurred, oddly enough, on Hal-
low-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given
over to festivity. Latreille had motored me out to a
small dinner-dance at Washburn's, on Long Island,
but I had left early in the evening, perversely de-
pressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart to
join. Twice, on the way back to the city, I had called
out to Latreille for more speed. We had just taken a
turn in the outskirts of Brooklyn when my swinging
headlights disclosed the figure of a man, an unstable
and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall
directly in front of my car.

I heard the squeal of the brakes and the high-pitched
shouts from a crowd of youths along the sidewalk.
But it was too late. I could feel the impact as we
struck. I could feel the sickening thud and jolt as
the wheels pounded over that fallen body.

I stood up, without quite knowing what I was doing,
and screamed like a woman. Then I dropped weakly
back in my seat. I think I was sobbing. I scarcely
noticed that Latreille had failed to stop the car. He
spoke to me twice, in fact, before I knew it.

"Shall we go on, sir?" he asked, glancing back at
me over his shoulder.

"Go on!" I shouted, knowing well enough by this
time what I said, surrendering merely to that blind
and cowardly panic for self-preservation which marks
man at his lowest.

We thumped and swerved and speeded away on the
wings of cowardice. I sat there gasping and clutching

i8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

my moist fingers together, as I've seen hysterical
women do, calling on Latreille for speed, and still
more speed.

I don't know where he took me. But I became con-
scious of the consoling blackness of the night about
us. And I thanked God, as Cain must have done
when he found himself alone with his shame.

"Latreille," I said, breathing brokenly as we slowed
up, "did we — did we kill him?"

My chauffeur turned in his seat and studied my
face. Then he looked carefully back, to make sure
we were not being followed.

"This is a heavy car, sir," he finally admitted. He
said it coolly, and almost impersonally. But the words
fell like a sledge-hammer on my heart.

"But we couldn't have killed a man," I clamored
insanely, weakly, as we came to a dead stop at the
roadside.

"Forty-two hundred pounds — and he got both
wheels !" calmly protested my enemy, for I felt now
that he was in some way my enemy.

"What in heaven's name are you going to do?" I
gasped, for I noticed that he was getting down from
his seat.

"Hadn't I better get the blood off the running-gear,
before we turn back into town?"

"Blood?" I quavered as I clutched at the robe-rail
in front of me. And that one word brought the hor-
ror of the thing home to me in all its ghastliness. I
could see axles and running-board and brake-bar drip-
ping with red, festooned with shreds of flesh, maculated

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 19

with blackening gore. And I covered my face with
my hands, and groaned aloud in my misery of soul.

But Latreille did not wait for me. He lifted the seat-
cushion, took rubbing-cloths from the tool-box and
crawled out of sight beneath the car. I could feel the
occasional tremors that went through the frame-work
as he busied himself at that grisly task. I could hear
his grunt of satisfaction when he had finished. And
I watched him with stricken eyes as he stepped through
the vague darkness and tossed his telltale cloths far
over the roadside fence.

"It's all right," he companionably announced as he
stepped back into the car. But mere was a new note
in the man's demeanor, a note which even through
that black fog of terror reached me and awakened my
resentment. We were partners in crime. We were
fellow-actors in a drama of indescribable cowardice,
and I was in the man's power, to the end of time.

The outcome of that catastrophe, as I have already
said, was indefinite, torturingly indefinite. I was
too shaken and sick to ferret out its consequences.
I left that to Latreille, who seemed to understand
well enough what I expected of him.

That first night wore by, and nothing came of it
all. The morning dragged away, and my fellow-
criminal seemingly encountered nothing worthy of
rehearsal to me. Then still another night came and
went. I went through the published hospital reports,
and the police records, with my heart in my mouth.
But I could unearth no official account of the tragedy.
I even encountered my good friend Patrolman Mc-

20 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Cooey, apparently by accident, and held him up on his
beat about Gramercy Park to make casual inquiries
as to street-accidents, and if such things were increas-
ing of late. But nothing of moment, apparently, had
come to McCooey's ears. And I stood watching him
as he flatfooted his way placidly on from my house-
front, with one of my best cigars tucked under his
tunic, wondering what the world would say if it knew
that Witter Kerfoot, the intrepid creator of sinewy
supermen who snarl and fight and shake iron fists in
the teeth of Extremity, had run like a rabbit from a
human being he had bowled over and killed?

I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell
myself that it is no easy thing to knock the life out of
a man, passionately upbraiding myself for not doing
what I should have done to succor the injured, then
sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned
about the weight of my car. Yet it wasn't until .the
next night, as I ventured out to step into that odiously
ponderous engine of destruction, that uncertainty solidi-
fied into fact.

"You got him" announced my chauffeur out of one
side of his mouth, so that Benson, who stood on the
house-steps, might not overhear those fateful words.

"Got him?" I echoed, vaguely resenting the man's
use of that personal pronoun singular.

"Killed!" was Latreille's monosyllabic explanation.
And my heart stopped beating.

"How do you know that?" I demanded in whisper-
ing horror. For I understood enough of the law of
the land to know that a speeder who flees from the

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 21

victim of his carelessness is technically guilty of man-
slaughter.

"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the
body back to his house. Crotty's just told me about
it."

My face must have frightened Latreille, for he
covered his movement of catching hold of my arm by
ceremoniously opening the car door for me.

"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and con-
spiratorial undertone. "Sit tight — for it's all that's
left to do!"

I sat tight. It was all there was to do. I endured
Latreille's accession of self-importance without com-
ment. There promptly grew up between us a tacit
understanding of silence. Yet I had reason to feel
that this silence wasn't always as profound as it
seemed. For at the end of my third day of self-
:orturing solitude I went to my club to dine. I went
vith set teeth. I went in the hope of ridding my sys-
:em of self-fear, very much as an alcoholic goes to a
rurkish-bath. I went to mix once more with my fel-
ows, to prove that I stood on common ground with
:hem.

But the mixing was not a success. I stepped across
hat familiar portal in quavering dread of hostility.
Vnd I found what I was looking for. I detected myself ?
>eing eyed coldly by men who had once posed as my
riends. I dined alone, oppressed by the discovery
hat I was being deliberately avoided by the fellow-
nembers of what should have been an organized com-
•anionability. Then I took a grip on myself, and for-

22 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

lornly argued that it was all mere imagination, the
vaporings of a morbid and chlorotic mind. Yet the
next moment a counter-shock confronted me. For as
I stared desolately out of that club window I caught
sight of Latreille himself. He stood there at the curb,
talking confidently to three other chauffeurs clustered
about him between their cars. Nothing, I suddenly
remembered, could keep the man from gossiping. And
a word dropped in one servant's ear would soon pass on
to another. And that other would carry the whisper
still wider, until it spread like an infection from below-
stairs to above-stairs, and from private homes to the
very housetops. And already I was a marked man, a
pariah, an outcast with no friendly wilderness to
swallow me up.

I slunk home that night with a plumb-bob of lead
swinging under my ribs where my heart should have
been. I tried to sleep and could not sleep. So I
took a double dose of chloral hydrate, and was re-
warded with a few hours of nightmare wherein I was
a twentieth-century Attila driving a racing-car over
an endless avenue of denuded infants. It was all so
horrible that it left me limp and quailing before the
lash of daylight. Then, out of a blank desolation that
became more and more unendurable, I clutched fever-
ishly at the thought of Mary Lockwood and the
autumn-tinted hills of Virginia. I felt the need of
getting away from that city of lost sleep. I felt the
need of "exteriorating" what was corroding my in-
most soul. I was seized with a sudden and febrile
ache for companionship. So I sent a forty-word wire

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT 23

to the only woman in the world I could look to in my
extremity. And the next morning brought me a reply.

It merely said, "Don't come."

The bottom seemed to fall out of the world, with
that curt message, and I groped forlornly, frantically,
for something stable to sustain me. But there was
nothing. Bad news, I bitterly reminded myself, had
the habit of traveling fast. Mary knew. The endless
:hain had widened, like a wireless-wave. It had rolled
on, like war-gas, until it had blighted even the slopes
beyond the Potomac. For Mary knew!

It was two days later that a note, in her picket- fence
script that was as sharp-pointed as arrow-heads, fol-
lowed after the telegram.

"There are certain things," wrote Mary, "which
[ can scarcely talk about on paper. At least, not as I
should prefer talking about them. But these things
must necessarily make a change in your life, and in
mine. I don't want to seem harsh, Witter, but we can't
^o on as we have been doing. We'll both have to get
ased to the idea of trudging along in single harness.
A.nd I think you will understand why. I'm not ex-
icting explanations, remember. I'm merely requesting
in armistice. If you intend to let me, I still want to
)e your friend, and I trust no perceptible gulf will
yarn between us, when we chance to dine at the
;ame table or step through the same cotillion. But I
nust bow to those newer circumstances which seem
o have confronted you even before they presented
hemselves to me. So when I say good-by, it is more
o the Past, I think, than to You."

That was the first night, I remember, when sleep-

24 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

ing-powders proved of no earthly use to me. And
this would not be an honest record of events if I
neglected to state that the next day I shut myself up
in my study and drank much more Pommcry-Greno
than was good for me. I got drunk, in fact, blindly,
stupidly, senselessly drunk. But it seemed to drape a
veil between me and the past. It made a bonfire of my
body to burn up the debris of my mind. And when
poor old patient-eyed Benson mixed me a bromide and
put me to bed I felt like a patient coming out of
ether after a major operation. I was tired, and I
wanted to lie there and rest for a long time.

CHAPTER II

THE OX-BLOOD VASE

IT was a week later, and well after two, in the
dullest ebb of earth's deadest hour, when Benson
lifted the portiere and stepped into my room.

I put down the book at which my brain had been
scratching like a dog scratching at a closed door. It
was a volume of Gautier's nouvclles. I had just
reached that mildly assuaging point in Une Nuit de
CUopatre where the mysterious arrow, whistling
through the palace window of a queen bored almost to
extinction, buries itself quivering in the cedar wainscot-
ing above her couch.

But the incident, this time, seemed to have lost its
appeal. The whole thing sounded very empty and
old, very foolish and far-away. The thrill of drama,
I cogitated, is apt to leak out of a situation when it
comes to one over a circuit of two thousand molder-
ing years. So I looked up at my servant a little listless-
ly and yet a little puzzled by what was plainly a
studied calmness of appearance.

"Benson, why aren't you in bed?"

"If you will pardon me, sir," began the intruder,
"I've a gentleman here."

He was so extraordinarily cool about it that I rose
like a fish at the flash of something unusual.

"At this time of night?" I inquired.

26 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Yes, sir."

"But what kind of gentleman, Benson?"

Benson hesitated; it was the sort of hesitation that
is able to translate silence into an apology.

"I think, sir, it's a burglar."

"A what?" I demanded, incredulously.

"The fact is, sir, I 'appened to hear him at the lock.
When he forced the door, sir, not being1 able to work
the lock, I was waiting for him."

The dropped aspirate was an unfailing sign of mental
disturbance in Benson. I closed my book and tossed it
aside. It was only drama of the second dimension, as
old and musty as a mummy. And here, apparently, was
adventure of the first water, something of my own
world and time.

"This sounds rather interesting, Benson. Be so
good as to show the gentleman up."

I sat down, with a second look at the dragging
kands of the little French clock on my mantel. But
Benson still seemed a trifle ill at ease.

"I — I took the liberty of tying him up a bit, sir,"
explained that astute old dissembler, "being compelled,
as it were, to use a bit of force."

"Of course. Then untie him as much as necessary,
and fetch him here. And you might bring up a bottle
of Lafttte and a bite to eat. For two, if you please."

"Yes, sir," he answered. But still he hesitated.

"The revolver, sir, is in the cabinet-drawer on your
left."

There were times when old Benson could almost
make me laugh; times when the transparencies of his

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 27

obliquities converted them into something almost re-
spectable.

"We won't need the revolver, Benson. What I
most need I fancy is amusement, distraction, excite-
ment, anything — anything to get me through this end-
less hell of a night."

I could feel my voice rise on the closing words,
like the uprear of a terrified racehorse. It was not
a good sign. I got up and paced the rug, like a cast-
away pacing some barren and empty island. But
here, I told myself, was a timely footprint. I waited,
as breathless as a Crusoe awaiting his Friday.

I waited so long that I was beginning to dread some
mishap. Then the portiere parted for the second time,
and Benson led the burglar into the room.

I experienced, as I looked at him, a distinct sense
of disappointment. He was not at all what I ex-
pected. He wore no black mask, and was neither
burly nor ferocious. The thing that first impressed me
was his slenderness — an almost feline sort of slender-
ness. The fact I next remarked was that he was very
badly frightened, so frightened, in fact, that his face
was the tint of a rather soiled white glove. It could
never have been a ruddy face. But its present start-
ling pallor, I assumed, must have been largely due
to Benson's treatment, although I was still puzzled
by the look of abject terror which gave the captive's
eyes their animal-like glitter. He stood before me
for all the world as though a hospital interne had been
practising abstruse bandaging feats on his body, so
neatly and yet so firmly had the redoubtable Benson

28 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

hobbled him and swathed his arms in a half-dozen of
my best Irish linen table-napkins. Over these, again,
had been wound and buckled a trunk-strap. Benson
had not skimped his job. His burglar was wrapped as
securely as a butcher wraps a boned rib-roast.

My hope for any diverting talk along the more pic-
turesque avenues of life was depressingly short-lived.
The man remained both sullen and silent. His sulky
speechlessness was plainly that of a low order of mind
menaced by vague uncertainties and mystified by new
surroundings. Blood still dripped slowly down the
back of his soiled collar, where Benson's neat whelp
had abraded the scalp.

Yet his eyes, all the time, were alert enough. They
seemed to take on a wisdom that was uncanny, the
inarticulate wisdom of a reptile, bewildering me, for
all their terror, with some inner sense of vicious secur-
ity. To fire questions at him was as futile as throw-
ing pebbles at an alligator. He had determined,
apparently, not to open his lips; though his glance,
all this time, was never an idle or empty one. I gave
up, with a touch of anger.

"Frisk him," I told the waiting Benson. As that
underworld phrase was new to those respectable
Anglian ears, I had to translate it. "See if he's carry-
ing a gun. Search his pockets — every one of them."

This Benson did, with an affective mingling of
muffled caution and open repugnance. He felt from
pocket to pocket, as gingerly as small boys feel into
ferret holes, and with one eye always on the colorless
and sphinx-like face beside him.

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 29

The result of that search was quite encouraging.
From one pocket came an ugly, short-barreled Colt.
From another came two skeleton keys and a few
inches of copper wire bent into a coil. From still
another came a small electric flashlight. Under our
burglar's coat, with one end resting in his left-hand
waistcoat pocket, was a twenty-inch steel "jimmy."
It was a very attractive tool, not unlike a long and
extremely slender stove lifter, with a tip-tilted end. I
found it suggestive of tremendous leverage-power,
tempting one to test its strength. It proved as in-
viting to the hand as a golfer's well-balanced "driver."

From the right-hand waistcoat pocket Benson pro-
duced a lady's gold watch, two finger rings, a gold
barrette, and a foot or two of old-fashioned locket
chain, of solid gold. There was nothing to show who
the owner of this jewelry might be.

"I suppose you just bought this at Tiffany's?" I
inquired. But the needle of antiphrasis had no effect
on his indurated hide. His passivity was beginning
to get on my nerves. He might have been a wax
figure in the Eden Musee, were it not for those reptil-
iously alert and ever exasperating eyes. I stood up
and confronted him.

"I want to know where this stuff came from."

The white-faced burglar still looked at me out of
those sullen and rebellious blinkers of his. But not
a word passed his lips.

"Then we'll investigate a little farther," I said, ey-
ing his somewhat protuberant breast-bone. "Go on
with the search, Benson, and get everything." For it

30 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

was plain that our visitor, before honoring us that
night, had called at other homes.

I watched Benson with increased interest as his
fastidiously exploring hand went down inside the
burglar's opened waistcoat. I saw him feel there, and
as he did so I caught a change of expression on our
prisoner's face. He looked worried and harassed by
this time; he seemed to have lost his tranquil and
snake-like assurance. His small, lean head with the
pathetically eager eyes took on a rat-like look. I knew
then the end toward which my mind had been groping.
The man was not snake-like. He was rat-like. He was
a cornered rat. Rat seemed written all over him.

But at that moment my eyes went back to Benson,
for I had seen his hand bringing away a small vase
partly wrapped in a pocket-handkerchief. This
handkerchief was extremely dirty.

I took the vase from his hand, drawing away the
rag that screened it. Only by an effort, as I did so,
was I able to conceal my surprise. For one glance
at that slender little column of sang-de-boeuf porcelain
told me what it was. There was no possibility of
mistake. One glimpse of it was enough. It was from
the Gubtill collection. For once before my fingers had
caressed the same glaze and the same tender con-
tours. Once before, and under vastly different cir-
cumstances, I had weighed that delicate tube of porce-
lain in my contemplative hands.

I sat back and looked at it more carefully. I ex-
amined the crackled groundwork, with its brilliant
mottled tones, and its pale ruby shades that deepened

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 31

into crimson. I peered down at the foot of enameled
white with its slowly deepening tinge of pale green.
Then I looked up at the delicate lip, the lip that had
once been injured and artfully banded with a ring of
gold. It was a vase of the K'angshi Period, a rare
and beautiful specimen among the Lang Yao mono-
chromes. And history said that thirty years before
it had been purchased from the sixth Prince of Pekin,
and had always been known as "The Flame."

Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase.
Our contest for it had been a spirited one, and had
even been made the subject of a paragraph or two in
the morning papers. But an inexplicably reckless
mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector,
and he had won, though the day after the Graves sale
I had been a member of that decorously appreciative
dinner party which had witnessed its installation be-
tween a rather valuable peach-bloom amphora of
haricot-red groundwork, with rose spots accentuated
by the usual clouds of apple-green, and a taller and,
to my mind, much more valuable ashes-of-roses
cylindrical Lang Yao with a carved ivory base. We
had looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event,
for such things naturally are not picked up every
day. So the mere sight of the vase took me back to
the Gubtill home, to that rich and spacious house on
lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few
happy evenings. And that in turn took my thoughts
back to a certain Volpi sale and an old Italian table-
cover of blue velvet. From the table-cover they flashed
on to Mary Lockwood and the remembered loveliness

32 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

of her face as we stood side by side staring down at
the gold galloon along the borders of that old vest-
ment. Then I drew memory up short, with a wince,
as I suddenly realized that the wanderer had been
penetrating into strictly forbidden paths.

I put the vase down on my table and turned away
from it, not caring to betray my interest in it, nor
to give to the rat-like eyes still watching me any ink-
ling of my true feelings. Yet the thought of such
beauty being in the hands of a brute like that sickened
me. I was angered by the very idea that such grace
and delicacy should be outraged by the foul rags and
the even fouler touch of a low-browed sneakthief. I
resented the outrage, just as any normal mind would
resent a jungle ape's abduction of a delicate child.

I turned and looked the criminal up and down. I
noticed, for the first time, that his face was beaded
with sweat.

"Might I inquire just what you intend doing with
this?" I asked, gazing back, against my will, at the
fragile little treasure known as The Flame.

The man moved uneasily, and for the first time.
For the first time, too, he spoke.

"Give it to its owner," he said.

"And who is its owner?"

He looked from me to the vase, and then back
again.

"It belongs to a pal o' mine over t' Fifth Avenue,"
he had the effrontery to assert.

"And where did you get it?"

"Out o' hock!"

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 33

I couldn't restrain a touch of impatience as my
glance fell on the all too eloquent implements of
burglary.

"And you expect me to swallow that ?" I demanded.

"I don't give a dam' what you swallow. I know
the trut' when I'm sayin' it!"

"And you're telling me the truth ?" I found it hard
to keep my anger within bounds.

"Sure," was his curt answer.

"That's a cowardly lie !" I cried out again. "You're
a coward and a liar, like all your sneaking kind, that
skulk about dark corners, and crawl under beds, and
arm yourself to the teeth, and stand ready to murder
innocent women, to strike them down in the dark,
rather than be found out! It's cowardice, the lowest
and meanest kind of cowardice !"

The sweat stood out on his face in glistening drops.

"What's eatin' you, anyway?" he demanded. "What
'ave I done?"

I pushed the cluster of women's jewelry closer to
him.

"You ve done some of the meanest and dirtiest
work a man can stoop to. You've skulked and crawled
and slunk through the dark to rob women and chil-
dren!"

"Who's given you a license to call me a coward ?"

"Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low
and arrant cowardice in work like this?"

"Just try it," he said with a grin that made his
face hideous.

"Why should I try it?" I demanded. "Do you

34 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

suppose because I don't carry a jimmy and gun that
I can't face honest danger when I need to?"

I glanced round at my den walls, studded with
trophies as they were, from the bull moose over the
fireplace to the leopard pelt under my heels. The
other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl
of contempt. He had jumped to the conclusion, of
course, that those relics of encounter in the open
stood as a sort of object-lesson of bravery which be-
longed to me in person.

"Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off
into some less personal side-issue, "that's all play-
actin'. Get up against what I have, and you'd tone
down your squeal. Then you'd walk into the real
thing."

"The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and
running like a pelted cur at the sight of a brass but-
ton!"

I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an
effort for him to speak.

"You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he
retorted. "And the kind o' nerve that ain't a cuff-
shooter's long suit."

My movement of contempt brought him a step or two
nearer. But it was Benson who spoke first.

"Hadn't we better have the police, sir?" he sug-
gested. The burglar, with his eyes on my face, stepped
still closer, as though to shoulder any such suggestion
as Benson's out of the issue.

"You just go out in the middle of the night," he
went on, with derisive volubility. "Go out at night

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 35

and look at a house. Stand off, and look at it good
and plenty. Then ask yourself who's inside, and what's
doin' behind them brick walls, and who's awake, and
where a shot's goin' to come from, and what chances
of a getaway you'll have, and the size of the bit you'll
get if you're pinched. Just stand there and tell your-
self you've got to get inside that house, and make
your haul and get away with the goods, that you've
got to do it or go with empty guts. Try it, and see
if it takes nerve."

I must have touched his professional pride. I had
trifled with that ethical totem-pole that is known as
honor among thieves.

"All right," I said, suddenly turning on him as the
inspiration came to me. "We'll try it, and we'll try
it together. For I'm going to make you take this
stuff back, and take it back to-night."

I could see his face cloud. Then a sudden change
came over it. His rat-like eyes actually began to
twinkle.

"I think we ought to have the police, sir," reiter-
ated Benson, remembering, doubtless, his encounter
below-stairs. "He's an uncommon tricky one, sir."

I saw, on more sober second thought, that it would
be giving my friend too much rope, too many chances
for treachery. And he would not be over-nice in his
methods, I knew, now that I had him cornered. A
second idea occurred to me, a rather intoxicating one.
I suddenly felt like a Crusader saving from pollution
a sacred relic. I could catch the whimper of some
unkenneled sense of drama in the affair.

36 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Benson," I said, "I'm going to leave this worthy
gentleman here with you. And while you look after
him, I'm going to return this peach-bloom vase to its
owner."

"He ain't in town to-night," broke in my troubled
burglar.

"And to demonstrate to his somewhat cynical cast
of mind that there's nothing extraordinary in his par-
ticular line of activity, I propose to return it in the
same manner that it was taken."

Benson looked troubled.

"I beg pardon, sir, but mightn't it get us all into
a bit of trouble? Couldn't we leave it until morning,
sir, and talk it over quiet-like with your friend Mr.
McCooey, or with Lieutenant Belton, sir, or the gentle-
man from the Pinkerton office?"

"And have a cuff-shooter running for help over such
a triviality? Never, Benson, never! You will make
yourself comfortable here with this gallant gentle-
man of the black-jack, and keep this handsome Colt
of his quite close about you while you're doing it.
For I'm going to take this piece of porcelain back
where it belongs, even though I have to face a dozen
lap-dogs and frighten every housemaid of Twelfth
Street into hysterics."

Nobody, I have more than once contended, is alto-
gether sane after midnight. This belief came back to
me as I stood before that gloomy-fronted Fifth Avenue
house, in that ebb-tide hour of the night when even
Broadway is empty, wondering what lay behind the
brownstone mask, asking myself what dangers lurked

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 37

about that inner gloom, speculating as to what sleep-
ers stirred and what eyes, even as I stood there, might
be alert and watching.

As Benson had suggested, I might have waited
decorously until daylight, or I might have quietly
ascended the wide stone steps and continued to ring
the electric push-bell until a sleepy servant answered
it. But that, after all, seemed absurdly tame and
commonplace. It was without the slightest tang of
drama, and I was as waywardly impatient to try that
enticing tip-tilted instrument of steel on an opposing
door as a bov with a new knife is to whittle on the
nursery woodwork.

There was a tingle of novelty even in standing before
a grimly substantial and altogether forbidding-looking
house, and being conscious of the fact that you had
decided on its secret invasion. I could no longer deny
that it took a certain crude form of nerve. I was
convinced of this, indeed, as 'I saw the approaching
figure of a patrolman on his rounds. It caused me,
as I felt the jimmy like a staybone against my ribs,
and the flashlight like a torpedo-head in my pocket,
to swing promptly about into Twelfth Street and walk
toward Sixth Avenue. I experienced a distinct glow
of satisfaction as the patrolling footsteps passed north-
ward up the quietness of the avenue.

But the house itself seemed as impregnable as a
fortress. It disheartened me a little to find that not
even a basement grill had been disturbed. For the
second time I turned and sauntered slowly toward
Sixth Avenue. As I swung eastward again I found

38 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

that the last house on the side-street, the house abut-
ting the Fifth Avenue mansion which was the object
of my attack, was vacant. Of that there could be no
doubt. Its doors and windows were sealed with
neatly painted shutters.

This, it occurred to me, might mark a possible line
of approach. But here again I faced what seemed
an impregnable position. I was backing away a little,
studying that boarded and coffin-like front, when my
heel grated against the iron covering of a coal-chute.
This coal-chute stood midway between the curb and
the area railing. I looked down at it for a moment
or two. Then something prompted me to test its
edge with the toe of my shoe. Then, making quite
sure that the street was empty, I stooped down and
clutched at the edge of the iron disk. It was quite
heavy. But one tug at it showed me that its lock-
chain had been forced apart.

It took but a moment to lift the metal shield to one
side of the chute-head. It took but another moment
to lower myself into the chute itself. I could see that
it was a somewhat ignominious beginning. But I felt
buoyantly sure that I was on the right track. It took
an effort to work the iron disk back over the opening.
It also required many strange contortions of the body
to worm my way down into that narrow and dirty
tunnel.

My rather peremptory advent into the coal-bin
resulted in a startling amount of noise, noise enough
to wake the soundest of sleepers. So I crouched there
for several seconds, inhaling dust, and listening and

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 39

wondering whether or not the walls above me harbored
a caretaker. Then I took out the pocket searchlight,
and, with the pressure of a ringer, directed my ray of
illumination againct a wooden partition bisected by
a painted wooden door.

A distinct sense of disappointment swept through
me as I stooped down to examine this door and
found that it had already been forced open. I knew,
however, that I was following in the footsteps of my
more experienced predecessor. Then came a store-
room, and then a laundry-room, with another jim-
mied door at the head of the stairway leading to
the first floor.

Here I stood waiting and listening for some time.
But still again nothing but darkness and silence and
that musty aroma peculiar to unoccupied houses sur-
rounded me. I felt more at home by this time, and
was more leisurely in my survey of the passage up-
ward. I was, of course, confronted by nothing more
disturbing than ghost-like furniture covered with tick-
ing and crystal-hung chandeliers encased in cheese-
cloth. I began to admire my friend the burglar's
astuteness in choosing so circuitous and yet so pro-
tected a path. There was almost genius in it. His
advance, I felt sure, was toward the roof. As I had
expected, I found the scuttle open. The lock, I could
see, had been quite cleverly picked. And, so far, there
had not been a mishap.

Once out on the housetop, however, I foresaw that
I would have to be more careful. As I clambered up
to the higher coping-tiles that marked the line of

40 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

the next roof, I knew that I had actually broken into
the enemy's lines. Yet the way still seemed clear
enough. For, as I came to the roof-scuttle of the
second house I found that it, too, remained unlocked.
My predecessor had made things almost disappointingly
easy for me. Yet, in another way, he had left things
doubly dangerous. I had to bear the brunt of any
mis-step he may have made. I was being called to
face the responsibility of both his intrusion and my
own.

So it was with infinite precaution that I lifted the
scuttle and leaned over that little well of darkness,
inhaling the warmer air that seeped up in my face.
With it came an odor quite different to that of the
house I had just left. There was something exposi-
tory in it, something more vital and electric, eloquent
of a place inhabited, of human beings and their lairs
and trails, of movement and life and vaguely defined
menaces. It was, I fancied, a good deal like that man-
smell which comes down-wind to a stalked and wary
elk.

I stepped down on the iron ladder that led into
the uncertain darkness, covering the trap after me. I
began to feel, as I groped my way downward, that
the whole thing was becoming more than a game. I
was disturbed by the thought of how deep I had ven-
tured into an uncertainty. I began to be oppressed
by the thought of how complicated my path was prov-
ing. I felt intimidated by the undetermined intri-
cacies that still awaited me. A new anxiety was taking
possession of me, a sort of low fever of fear, an in-

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 41

creasing impatience to replace my precious porcelain,
end my mission, and make my escape to the open.

It began to dawn on me, as I groped lower and
lower down through the darkness, that a burglar's
calling was not all beer and skittles. I began to feel a
little ashamed of my heroics of an hour before.

Then I drew up, suddenly, for a sound had crept to
my ears. The tingle that ran through my body was
not wholly one of fright. Yet, as I stood there in
the darkness with one hand against the wall, I caught
the rhythm of a slow and muffled snoring. There was
something oddly reassuring in that reiterated vibra-
tion, even though it served to emphasize the dangers
that surrounded me. It was not unlike the sound of
a bell-buoy floating up to a fog-wrapped liner's bridge.

I was no longer a prey to any feeling of hesitancy.
I was already too deep in the woods to think of turn-
ing back. My one passion now was to complete the
circuit, to emerge on the other side.

I began to wonder, as I felt for the stair banister
and groped my cautious way down the treads, just
how the burglar himself had effected that final exit
from the house. And the sooner I got away from the
sleeping quarters, I felt, the safer I would be. Every
bedroom was a shoal of dangers, and not all of them,
I very well knew, would be equipped with the same
generous whistling-buoy as that I had just left be-
hind me. There was, too, something satisfying in the
knowledge that I was at least getting nearer and
nearer the ground-floor. This was due, not so much
to the fact that I was approaching a part of the house

42 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

with which I was more or less familiar, but more to
the fact that my descent marked an approach to some
possible pathway of escape. For that idea was now
uppermost in my mind, and no aviator with a balky
motor ever ached to get back to earth more eagerly
than I.

The utter darkness and silence of the lower halls
were beginning to get on my nerves. I was glad to feel
the newel-post, which assured me that I had reached the
last step in my descent I was relieved to be able to
turn carefully and silently about to the left, to grope
toward a door which I knew stood before me in the
gloom, and then cautiously to turn the knob and step
inside.

I knew at once, even before I took the flashlight
from my pocket, that I was in the library. And the
room that opened off this, I remembered, half cabinet-
lined study and half informal exhibition-room, was
the chamber wherein Anthony Gubtill treasured his
curios. It would take but a minute or two, I knew,
to replace his priceless little porcelain. And another
minute or two, I felt, ought to see me safely out and
on my way home.

I stood with my back to the door, determined that
no untimely blunder should mar the end of my ad-
venture. My first precaution was to thrust out my
flashlight and make sure of my path. I let the incan-
descent ray finger interrogatively about the massively
furnished room, resting for a moment on marble and
metal and glass-fronted book-shelf. I remembered,
with almost a smile of satisfaction, the little Clytie

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 43

above the fireplace, and the Hcbc. in bronze that stood
beside the heavy reading-lamp. This lamp, Gubtill
had once told me, had come from Munich ; and I
remembered his chuckle over the fact that it had come
in a "sleeper" trunk and had evaded duty.

Then I let the wavering: lieiit travel toward the
end of the glimmering and dark- wooded reading- table.
I stood there, picking out remembered object after ob-
ject, remarking them with singular detachment of mind
as my light continued to circle the end of the room.

Then I quietly made my way to the open door in
the rear, and bisecting that second room with my
spear of light, satisfied myself that the space between
the peach-bloom amphora and the ashes-of-roses Yang
Lao with the ivory base was indeed empty.

I stood listening to the exotic tick of a brazen-dialed
Roumanian clock. I lingered there, letting my bald
light-shaft root like a hog's-snout along that shelf so
crowded with delicate tones and contours. I sighed a
little enviously as I turned toward the other end of
the room.

Then, of a sudden, I stopped breathing. Auto-
matically I let my thumb lift from the current-spring
of my storage-lamp and the light at once went out.
I stood there with every nerve of my body on edge.
I crouched forward, tingling and peering into the
darkness before me. For I had suddenly discovered
that I was not alone in the room.

There, facing me, picked out as distinctly as a baby
spot-light picks out an actor's face, I had seen the
owner of the house himself, not ten paces from me.

44 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

He was sitting in a high-backed armchair of green
leather. He must have been watching me from the
first, every moment and every movement. He had
made no effort to interrupt or intercept me. He had
been too sure of his position.

I waited for what seemed an interminable length of
time. But not a sound, beyond the querulous tick of
the clock, came to my ears. Not even a movement
took place in the darkness.

The undefined menace of this silence was too much
for me. The whole thing grew into something
strangely like a nightmare. I moved away, involun-
tarily, wondering what I should say, and after what
fashion I should begin my foolish explanation. I
crouched low and backed off obliquely, as though some
value lay in the intervention of space, and as though
something venomous were confronting me. I fell
slowly back, pawing frenziedly about me for some sus-
taining tangibility to which to cling. As I did so my
body came in contact with some article of furniture —
just what I could not tell. But I shied away from
it in a panic, as a colt shies at a fallen newspaper.

My sudden movement threw over a second piece
of furniture. It must have been some sort of col-
lapsible screen, for it fell to the floor with an echoing
crash. I waited, holding my breath, with horripila-
tions of fear nettling every limb of my body, knowing
only too well that this must indeed mark the end.

But there was no movement, no word spoken, no
slightest sound. I stared through the darkness, still
half expectant. I tried to tell myself that it may have

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 45

been mere hallucination, that expectant attention had
projected into my line of vision a purely imaginary
figure. I still waited, with my heart pounding. Then
the tension became more than I could endure. I ac-
tually crept forward a step or two, still peering blindly
through the darkness, still listening and waiting.

Then I caught my breath with sudden new sus-
picion, with a quick fear that crashed, bullet-like,
through the film of consciousness. It was followed by
a sickening sense of shock, amounting almost to physi-
cal nausea.

I once more raised the flashlight. This time my
hand shook perceptibly as I turned the electric ray
directly in front of me. I let the minute circle of il-
lumination arrow through the darkness, direct to the
white face that seemed to be awaiting it. Then I
let it come to a rest

I remember falling back a step or two. I may have
called out, but of that I am not sure. Yet of one
thing I was only too certain. There before me sat
Anthony Gubtill. He was quite, dead.

My first feeling was not altogether one of terror.
It was accompanied by a surge of indignation at the
injustice, at the brutality, of it all. I was able to
make note of the quilted dressing-gown that covered
the relaxed body. I was collected enough to assume
that he had overheard the intruder; had come to in-
vestigate, and had been struck down and cunningly
thrust into a chair. This inference was followed by
a flash of exultation as I remembered that his mur-
derer was known, that the crime could easily be proved

46 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

against him, that even at the present moment he was
safe in Benson's custody.

I moved toward the dead man, fortified by the
knowledge of a vast new obligation. It was only after
I had examined the face for a second time and seen
how death had been caused by a cruelly heavy blow,
dealt by some blunt instrument, that the enormity of
my own intrusion into that house of horror came home
to me. I felt a sudden need for light, for sobering
and rationalizing light. Even the ticking from the
brazen-faced clock had become something phantasmal
and unnerving.

I groped feverishly and blindly about in search of
an electric switch-button. Then, of a sudden, I stopped
again, my movement arrested by a sound.

I knew, as I stood and listened, that it was only the
purr of an automobile, faint and muffled from the
street outside. But it suddenly brought home to me
the awkwardness of my position. To be found in that
house, or even to be seen leaving it, was no longer a
desirable thing. My foolhardy caprice, before an ac-
tuality so overawing, dwindled into something worse
than absurdity. And thought came back at a bound
to the porcelain in my pocket. I recalled the old-time
rivalry between the dead man and myself for The
Flame. I recalled the details of my advent between
those walls where I stood. And mv blood went cold.
It was not a matter of awkwardness; it was a matter
of peril. For who, I again asked myself, would be-
lieve a story so absurd, or accept an excuse so extrava-
gant?

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 47

The clock ticked on accusingly. The sound of the
automobile stopped. I had just noted this with relief
when the thud of a quietly closed door fell on my
startled ears. Then came the murmur of voices. There
was no longer any doubt about the matter. A motor
had come to the door, and from it certain persons had
entered the house.

I crept to the library and listened. Then I tiptoed
back and closed the door of the inner room. I felt
more secure with even a half-inch panel between me-.,
and what that inner room held.

Then I listened. I began to hear the padded tread
of feet. Then came the sound of another opened door,
and then the snap of a light-switch. There was noth-
ing secret about the new invasion. I knew, as I shrank
back behind one of the high-backed library chairs, that
the front of the house was already illuminated.

Then came the sound of a calling voice, apparently
from the head of the stairs. It was a cautious and
carefully modulated voice; I took it for that of a young
man of about twenty.

"Is that you, Caddy?"

Then came a silence.

"I say, is that you, Orrie ?" was demanded in a some-
what somnolent stage-whisper. There was something
strangely reassuring in that commonplace boyish voice.
Anthony Gubtill, I knew, had no immediate family. I
vaguely recalled, however, some talk of a Canadian
nephew and niece who had at times visited him.

"Sh — s — sh !" said a woman's voice from the lower
hall. "Don't wake Uncle Anthony."

48 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

It must have been a young woman. Her voice
sounded pensive, like that of a girl who might be com-
ing home tired from a dance at Sherry's. Yet, know-
ing what I did, its girlish weariness took on a pathos
indescribably poignant.

"It's an awful hour, isn't it?" asked a second man's
voice from the lower hall. There were sounds that
seemed to imply that wraps were being removed.

"Almost four," came the answer from above. "Had
a good time, Caddy?"

I heard a stifled yawn.

"Rather," answered the girl's voice.

"I say, Orrie, bring up those Egyptian gaspers for
a puff or two, will you?" requested the youth from
above, still in a stage-whisper. "And, Caddy, be sure
the latch is on."

"On what?" demanded Orrie.

"The door, you idiot !" was the sleepily good-natured
retort.

Then I suddenly ducked low behind my chair-back,
for the young man called Orrie had flung open the
library door. He came into the room gropingly, with-
out switching on the electrics. I could see his trim
young shoulders, and the white blur of his shirt-front.
Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood a young
girl of about twenty, a blonde in pale blue, with bare
arms and bare shoulders. Her skin looked very soft
and baby-like in the strong sidelight. I could not re-
press something that was almost a shudder at the
thought of this careless gaiety and youth so close to
the grim tragedy behind me, so unconscious of the

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 49

awakening that might come to them at almost any
moment.

"Do hurry!" said the tired girl, as the young man
fumbled about the table-end. I realized, as I peeped
out at her, that my first duty would be to keep those
round young eyes from what might confront them in
that inner room.

"I've got 'em!" answered the man. He stood a
moment without moving. Then he turned and walked
out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

I emitted a gasp of relief and stood up once more.
Nothing alive or dead, I determined, would now keep
me in that house. Yet for all that new-born ecstasy of
impatience, I was still compelled to wait, for I could
hear the occasional sound of feet and a whisper or two
from behind the closed door. Then all sound died
away ; the gloom and silence again engulfed me.

I took the Yang Lao porcelain from my pocket, un-
wrapped it, and crept back to the inner room. I groped
along the wall in the darkness, circling wide about the
green-leather chair in the center. I put the vase back
on its cabinet, without so much as flashing my light.
Then I circled back along the wall, felt for the library
door, and groped cautiously across the perilous breadth
of the furniture-crowded chamber. It took me several
seconds to find the door that opened into the hallway.
Once through it and across the hall, I knew, onlv a
spring-latch stood between me and the street. So I
turned the knob quickly and swung back the door.

But I did not pass through it. For, instead of dark-
ness, I found myself confronted by a blaze of light.

50 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

In that blaze of light stood three waiting- and expectant
figures. What most disturbed me was the fact that
the man called Orrie held in his hand a revolver that
seemed the size of a toy-cannon. This was leveled
directly at my blinking eyes. The other youth, in
cerise pajamas with orange colored frogs and a dress-
ing-gown tied at the waist with a silk girdle, stood just
behind him, holding an extremely wicked-looking Sav-
age of the magazine make. Behind this youth again,
close by the newel-post, stood the girl in blue, all the
sleepiness gone out of her face.

The sight of that wide-eyed and eager trio irritated
me beyond words. There was no longer any thrill in
the thing. I had gone through too much ; I could not
react to this newer emergency. I kept wondering if
the idiot with the Colt realized just how delicate a
pressure would operate the trigger on which I could
see his finger shaking. But that shake, it was plain,
was more from excitement than fear.

"We've got him!" cried the youth in the cerise
pajamas. I might have been a somewhat obstinate
black bass wheedled into his landing-net, from the way
he spoke.

"Don't move!" commanded the older of the two,
wrinkling his brow into a frown of youthful determina-
tion. "Don't you dare move one inch, or I'll put a
hole through you."

I had no intention of moving.

"Watch his hands," prompted the younger man.
"He ought to put 'em up."

"Yes, Orrie, he ought to put them up," echoed the

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 51

girl by the newel-post. She reminded me, with her
delicate whites and pinks and blues, of the cabinet of
porcelain at which I had so recently stared.

"Back up through the door," cried Orrie. "Come
on — back up!"

I wearily obeyed this somewhat equine order. Then
he commanded me to hold my hands above my head.
I did so without hesitation; I had no wish to argue
while that Colt was staring me in the eyes.

They followed me, Indian file, into the room. It
was the girl who closed the door as Orrie switched
on the lights. She stood with her back to it, studying
my face. I could see that I rather interested them all.
But in that interest I detected no touch of either friend-
liness or respect. The only one I seemed to mystify
was the girl at the door.

"Have you anything to say?" demanded Orrie,
squaring his shoulders.

"Yes, I have a great deal to say," I told him. "But
I prefer saying it to you alone."

I could see his movement of disdain.

"Will you listen to that!" commented the youth in
the cerise pajamas.

"And if you will be so good as to stop poking that
pistol in my face," I continued with some heat, "and
then send these children out of the room, I shall say
what I have to, and do it very briefly!"

"Children!" came in an indignant gasp from the
girl at the door.

"We'll stick by you, old man," assured the youth-
ful hero in cerise, with his heels well apart.

52 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"And just why should I closet myself with a bur-
glar ?" inquired the astute Orrie, staring at me with the
utmost insolence. Yet I could see that at least the
precision of my articulation was puzzling him a bit.

"That's asinine," I retorted. "I'm not a burglar,
and you ought to know it."

To my astonishment, a little tripartite ripple of
laughter greeted this statement.

"Then what are you?" asked the incredulous Orrie.

I knew there was no further use beating about the
bush.

"Yes, who are you?" demanded the other youth.

He still held the magazine-revolver balanced in his
right hand. The truth had to come out.

"I'm Witter Kerfoot," I told them, as steadily as I
could. "Kerfoot, of Gramercy Park West."

"What number?"

I gave him the number. I could see the trio ex-
change glances; they were plainly glances of amuse-
ment. My young friends, I could see, were enjoying
a home melodrama, a melodrama in which I was ob-
viously the most foolish of villains. I began to feel
a good deal like a phonograph grinding out a comic
record.

"And with that face!" ejaculated the man called
Orrie.

The quiet contempt of his glance caused me to shift
about, so I could catch a glimpse of myself in the
Venetian mirror between the book-shelves. That
glimpse was indeed a startling one. I had quite for-
gotten the transit through the coal-hole. I could not

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 53

even remember how or when I broke my hat-crown.
I had remained as unconscious of the scratch across
my cheek as I was of the garret cobwebs that festooned
my clothing. I saw as I peeped into the mirror only
a sickly-hued and grimy-looking footpad with dirty
hands and a broken hat. It was no wonder they
laughed. My environment for the last hour had not
been one that tended toward consciousness of attire.
I was about to remove my disgracefully disfiguring
headgear when the younger man swung about on me
with the Savage thrust point-blank in my face.

"Don't try any of that !" he gasped. "You keep up
those hands."

The whole situation was so beside the mark, was
so divorced from the sterner problem confronting both
them and myself, that it dispirited and angered me.

"We've had about enough of this tommy-rot!" I
protested.

"Yes, we'll cut out the tommy-rot, and get him
tied," proclaimed the man with the Colt.

"Then search him first," prompted the young man.
"Here, Caddy, take Orrie's Colt while he goes through
him," he commanded, in the chest-tones of a newly-
acquired savagery, "and if he tries to move, wing
him!"

The girl, wide-eyed and reluctant, took the heavy
revolver. Then Orrie advanced on me, though in an
altogether wary and tight-lipped manner. To con-
tinue my protests, I saw, would be only to waste my
breath. There was nothing to do but submit to the
farce.

^}ZJ. J.J.1L/ J.VJ..n.XN VViiU \^KJ \U Jt-^-LJ X\ i. OJ-,l^JL^iT

I said nothing as he produced die telltale flashlight.
I also remained silent as he triumphantly unearthed
the jimmy and the damnatory skeleton keys. I could
see the interchange of exultant glances as these were
tossed out on the polished table-top.

"Get the straps from the golf bags!" suggested the
youth with the Savage. I could not help remember-
ing how this scene was paralleling another of the same
nature and the same night, when Benson and I had
been the masters of the situation.

The man called Orrie seemed a little nonplussed at
the fact that he had found no valuables in my outer
pockets, but he did not give up. He grimly ignored
my protests as he explored still deeper and dug out
my monogramed wallet, and then a gold cigarette-case,
on which my name was duly inscribed. He turned
them over in his hand a couple of times and examined
them carefully. Then a great light seemed to come to
him. He succumbed, as even his elders have done, to
a sudden sense of drama.

I saw him dart to the outer room and catch up a
telephone directory. He riffled through the pages with
quick and impatient fingers. Then he strode back, and
looked me up and down.

"I know what this man's done," he cried, his eyes
alight with conviction.

"What?" demanded the younger man.

"He's visited more than this house to-night. He's
gone through Witter Kerfoot's, as well. He's taken
these things from there. And now it's up to ?w to take
him bark with them!"

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 55

I could see the sheer theatricality of the situation
clutch at his two listeners. I could see them surrender
to it, although the girl still seemed to hesitate.

"Hadn't I better call Uncle Anthony?" she sug-
gested.

At one breath her words brought me back to both
the tragedy that lay so close at hand, and the perilous
complexity of my own position.

"No, that's foolish !" cut in Orrie. "The car's still
outside. Caddy, I think you'll have to come along.
You can sit with Jansen on the driving-seat."

The hero of the maneuver turned back to me. I
was thinking mostly of the soft-eyed girl with the
baby-white skin, and how I could get her safely away.

"Will you come quietly?" my captor demanded of
me.

"Yes," I answered, without looking up, "I'll come
quietly."

It was the girl's voice, a little shrill with excitement,
that next broke the silence.

"Orrie, he's not a burglar!" she cried out, in her
treble-noted conviction.

"Then what is he?"

"He's a gentleman."

"What makes you think so?" demanded the indif-
ferent Orrie as he motioned me, with a curt move-
ment of his Colt-barrel, toward the hall door.

"I know by his nails I" was her inconsequential yet
quite definite reply.

Orrie laughed.

'Then you'd give tea and macaroons to every bur-

«<»■

56 THE MAX WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

glarious barber out of Sing Sing," he scoffed. "And
our real answer's waiting for us in Gramercy Square."

It seemed to take but a minute or two in the car
to swing us from Twelfth Street up to Twentieth,
and then eastward into the stillness of the square.
My captors had insisted that I should not talk. "Not
a word!" commanded Orrie, and I could feel his in-
solent gun-barrel against my ribs as he gave the com-
mand for the second time. They were drunk, I could
see, with the intoxication of their exploit. They were
preoccupied with inhaling their subtle sense of drama.
With the dictatorial self-sufficiency of true inebriety
they had enjoined me from every effort at explana-
tion. The bubble, they felt, was far too pretty a one
to be pricked.

They alighted, one in front of me and one behind
me, still carrying their foolish and murderous-looking
firearms. The girl remained in her seat. Then the
three of us grimly ascended my steps.

"It's needless to ring the bell," I wearily explained.
"My pass-key will admit you."

"But I insist on ringing," said Orrie as I fitted the
key to the lock.

"I shall be compelled, in that case, to call the officer
who is watching us from the corner," was my quiet
response.

"Call and be hanged, then !" was the younger man's
ultimatum.

One word over their shoulders brought my old
friend McCooey, the patrolman, across the corner and
up the steps. I swung open the door as he joined us.

THE OX-BLOOD VASE 57

Then I turned on the hall lamps and faced my two
captors.

"Officer, I want you to look at me very carefully,
and then assure these gentlemen I am Witter Kerfoot,
the owner and occupant of this house."

"Sure he's Kerfoot," said the unperturbed M cCooey.
"But what's the throuble this time?"

"Something more serious than these gentlemen
dream of. But if the three of us will go quietly up-
stairs, you'll find my man Benson there. You'll also
find another man, tied up with half a dozen — "

McCooey, from the doorway, cut me short.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't be stayin' to see your
joke out."

"But you've got to."

"Fact is, sir," he explained, in a lowered voice,
"Creegan, av Headquarthers, has a Sing-Sing lifer
bottled up in this block, and I'm holdin' wan end av
the p'lice lines — a jail-breaker, sir, and a tricky wan,
called Pip Foreman, the Rat !"

"The Rat?" I echoed.

"The same, sir. But I must be off."

"Don't go," I said, closing the door. "Your man's
upstairs, zvaiting for you!"

"Waitin' for me?" he demanded. "What man?"

"The man they call the Rat," I tried to explain to
him. "And I'll be greatly obliged to you, McCooey,
if you'll make as short work of this situation as you
can, for the truth of the matter is, I feel rather tired,
and fancy there's five or six hours of good honest sleep
awaiting me!"

CHAPTER III

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE

I WAS in for a night of it. I realized that as I
lay back in my big green library-chair and closed
my eyes. For somewhere just in front of those tightly
closed lids of mine I could still see a briskly revolving
sort of pin-wheel, glowing like a milk-white orange
against a murky violet fog that paled and darkened
with every beat of my pulse.

I knew the symptoms only two well. The entire
encampment of Consciousness was feverishly awake,
was alert, was on the qui-vwe. That pulsing white
pin-wheel was purely a personal matter between me
and my imagination. It was something distinctly my
own. It was Me. And being essentially subjective,
it could be neither banished nor controlled.

So I decided to make for the open. To think of a
four-poster, in any such era of intensified wakefulness,
would be a mockery. For I was the arena of that
morbid wakefulness which brought with it an over-
crowded mental consciousness of existence far beyond
my own physical vision, as though I had been appointed
night-watchman for the whole round world, with a
searching eye on all its multitudinous activities and
aberrations. I seemed able to catch its breathing as
it slept its cosmic sleep. I seemed to brood with lunar
aloofness above its teeming plains, depressed by its
enormous dimensions, confused by its incomprehen-

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 59

sible tangle and clutter of criss-cross destinies. Its
uncountable midnight voices seemed to merge into a
vague sigh, so pensively remote, so unexpressibly
tragic, that when I stood in my doorway and caught
the sound of a harebrained young Romeo go whistling
down past the Players' Club his shrill re-piping of a
Broadway roof-song seemed more than discordant; it
seemed desecration. The fool was happy, when the
whole world was sitting with its fists clenched, await-
ing some undefined doom.

It was long past midnight, I remembered as I closed
the door. For it must have been an hour and more
since I had looked out and seen the twelve ruby
flashes from the topmost peak of the Metropolitan
Tower signaling its dolorous message that another
day had gone. I had watched those twelve winks with
a sinking heart, finding something sardonic in their
brisk levity, for I had been reminded by a telltale neu-
rasthenic twitching of my right eyelid that some angling
Satan known as Insomnia was once more tugging and
jerking at my soul, as a fly-hook tugs and jerks at a
trout's mouth.

I knew, even as I wandered drearily off from my
house-door and paced as drearily round and round the
iron-fence park enclosure, that I was destined for
another sleepless night. And I had no intention of
passing it cooped up between four walls. I had tried
that before, and in that way, I remembered, madness
lay.

So I wandered restlessly on through the deserted
streets, with no active thought of destination and no

60 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

immediate sense of direction. All I remembered was
that the city lay about me, bathed in a night of ex-
ceptional mildness, a night that should have left it
beautiful. But it lay about me, in its stillness, as dead
and flat and stale as a tumbler of tepid wine.

I flung myself wearily down on a bench in Madison
Square, facing the slowly spurting fountain that had so
often seemed to me a sort of visible pulse of the sleep-
ing city. I sat peering idly up at the Flatiron Build-
ing, where like an eternal plowshare it threw its eternal
cross furrows of Fifth Avenue and Broadway along
the city's tangled stubble of steel and stone. Then I
peered at the sleepers all about me, the happy sleepers
huddled and sprawled along the park benches. I en-
vied them, every mortal of that ragged and homeless
army! I almost hated them. For they were drinking
deep of the one thing I had been denied.

As I lounged there with my hat pulled down over
my eyes, I listened to the soothing purr and splash of
the ever-pulsing fountain. Then I let my gaze wander
disconsolately southward, out past the bronze statue of
Seward. I watched the driver of a Twenty-third
Street taxicab of the "night-hawk" variety asleep on
his seat. He sat there in his faded hat and coat, as
motionless as metal, as though he had loomed there
through all the ages, like a brazen statue of Slumber
under his mellowing patina of time.

Then, as I gazed idly northward, I suddenly forgot
the fountain and the night-hawk chauffeur and the
sleepers. For out of Fifth Avenue, past where the
double row of electric globes swung down the

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 61

gentle slope of Murray Hill like a double pearl-strand
down a woman's breast, I caught sight of a figure
turning quietly into the quietness of the square. It
attracted and held my eye because it seemed the only
movement in that place of utter stillness, where even
the verdigris-tinted trees stood as motionless as though
they had been cut from plates of copper.

I watched the figure as it drew nearer and nearer.
The lonely midnight seemed to convert the casual
stroller into an emissary of mystery, into something
compelling and momentous. I sat indolently back on
my park bench, peering at him as he drifted in under
the milk-white arc lamps whose scattered globes were
so like a scurry of bubbles caught in the tree branches.

I watched the stranger as closely as a traveler in mid-
ocean watches the approach of a lonely steamer. I
did not move as he stood for a moment beside the
fountain. I gave no sign of life as he looked slowly
about, hesitated, and then crossed over to the end of
the very bench on which I sat. There was something
military-like about the slim young figure in its un-
timely and incongruous cape overcoat. There was also
something alert and guardedly observant in the man's
movements as he settled himself back in the bench. He
sat there listening to the purr and splash of the water.
Then, in an incredibly short space of time, he was
fast asleep.

I still sat beside him. I was still idly pondering who
and what the newcomer could be, when another move-
ment attracted my attention. It was the almost silent
approach of a second and larger figure, the figure of

62 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

a wide-shouldered man in navy blue serge, passing
quietly in between the double line of bench sleepers.
He circled once about the granite-bowled ring of the
fountain. Then he dropped diffidently into the seat
next to the man in the cape overcoat, not five feet
from where I sat.

Something about him, from the moment he took up
that position, challenged my attention. I watched him
from under my hat-brim as he looked guardedly about.
I did not move as he let his covert eyes dwell for a
moment or two on my lounging figure. I still watched
him as he bent forward and listened to the deep
breathing of the man so close beside him.

Then I saw a hand creep out from his side. There
was something quick and reptilious in its movements.
I saw it feel and pad about the sleeping man's breast.
Then I saw it slip, snake-like, in under the cloth of
the coat.

It moved about there, for a second or two, as though
busily exploring the recess of every possible pocket.

Then I saw the stealthy hand quietly but quickly
withdrawn. As it came away it brought with it a
packet that flashed white in the lamplight, plainly a
packet of papers. This was thrust hurriedly down into
the coat pocket of the newcomer next to me. There
was not a sound. There was no more movement.

The wide-shouldered man sat there for what must
have been a full minute of time. Then he rose quietly
to his feet and started as quietly away.

It wasn't until then that the full reality of what he
had done came home to me. He had deliberately

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 63

robbed a sleeping and unprotected man. He was at
that moment actually carrying away the spoils of some
predetermined and audacious theft. And I had sat
calmly and unprotestingly by and watched a thief,
a professional "dip," enact a crime under my very
eyes, within five feet of me!

In three quick steps I had crossed to the sleeping
man's side and was shaking him. I still kept my eyes
on the slowly retreating figure of the thief as he made
his apparently diffident way up through the square. I
had often heard of those street harpies known as
"lush-dips," those professional pickpockets who prey
on the wayside inebriate. But never before had I
seen one at work.

"Quick ! Wake up !" I cried, with a desperate shake
at the sleeper's shoulder. "You've been robbed!"

The next move of that little midnight drama was
an unexpected and startling one. Instead of being
confronted by the disputatious maunderings of a half-
wakened sleeper, as I expected, I was suddenly and
firmly caught by the arm and jerked bodily into the
seat beside him.

"You've been robbed !" I repeated, as I felt that firm
grip haul me seatward.

"Shut up !" said a calm and very wide-awake voice,
quite close to my ear. I struggled to tear my arm
away from the hand that still clung to it.

"But you've been robbed!" I expostulated. I noticed
that his own gaze was already directed northward, to-
ward where the blue-clad figure still moved aimlessly
on under the arc lamps.

64 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"How do you know that?" he demanded. I was
struck by his resolute and rather authoritative voice.

"Why, I saw it with my own eyes! And there goes
the man who did it!" I told him, pointing northward.

He jerked down my hand and swung around on me.

"Watch that man!" he said, almost fiercely. "But
for heaven's sake keep still!"

"What does this mean?" I naturally demanded.

He swept me with one quick glance. Yet he looked
more at my clothes, I fancy, than at my face. My
tailor seemed to be quite satisfactory to him.

"Who are you?" he asked. I took my time in an-
swering, for I was beginning to resent his repeated
note of superiority.

"My name, if that's what you mean, happens to be
the uneuphonious but highly respectable one of Ker-
foot — Witter Kerfoot."

"No, no," he said with quick impatience. "What
are you ?"

"I'm nothing much, except a member of a rather
respectable club, and a man who doesn't sleep overly
well."

His eyes were still keenly watching the slowly de-
parting figure. My flippancy seemed to have been lost
on him. His muscular young hand suddenly tightened
on my sleeve.

"By God, sir, you can help me !" he cried, under his
breath. "You must! I've a right to call on you, as
a decent citizen, as — "

"Who are you?" I interrupted, quite myself by this
time.

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 65

"I'm Lieutenant Palmer," he absently admitted, all
the while eying the moving figure.

"And I've got to get that man, or it'll cost me a
court-martial. I've got to get him. Wait! Sit back
here without moving. Now watch what he does !"

I saw the thief drop into an empty bench, glance,
down at his time-piece, look carelessly about, and then:
lean back with his legs crossed. Nothing more hap-
pened.

"Well," I inquired, "what's the game?"

"It's no game," he retorted, in his quick and decisive
tones. "It's damn near a tragedy. But now I've
found him! I've placed him! And that's the man
I'm after!"

"I don't doubt it," I languidly admitted. "But
am I to assume that this little bench scene was a sort
of, well, a sort of carefully studied out trap?"

"It was the only way I could clinch the thing," he
admitted.

"Clinch what ?" I asked, conscious of his hesitation.

"Oh, you've got to know," he finally conceded, "now
you've seen this much ! And I know you're — you're
the right sort. I can't tell you everything. But I'm
off the Connecticut. She's the flagship of our Atlantic-
fleet's first division, the flagship of Rear-Admiral
Shrodder. I was sent to confer with Admiral Maddox,
the commandant of the Navy Yard. Then I was to
communicate with Rear- Admiral Kellner, the super-
visor of Naval Auxiliaries. It was in connection with
the navy's new Emergency Wheel- Code. I can't ex-
plain it to you ; there's a lot of navy-department data

66 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I can't go into. But I was ashore here in New York
with a list of the new wireless code signals."

"And you let them get away?"

"There was no letting about it. They were stolen
from me, stolen in some mysterious way I can't under-
stand. I've only one clue. I'd dined at the Plaza.
Then I'd gone to the ballroom and sat through the
amateur theatricals for the French Hospital. I'd been
carrying the code forms and they'd been worrying me.
So I 'split the wheel,' as we say in the service. I
mean I'd divided 'em and left one half locked up at
my hotel while I still carried the other half. Each
part, I knew, would be useless without the other. How
or when they got the half I was carrying I can't tell,
for the life of me. I remember dancing two or three
times in the ballroom after the theatricals. But it
couldn't have been any of those women. They weren't
that sort."

"Then who was it?" For the first time a sense of
his boyishness had crept over me.

"That's just it; I don't know. But I kept feeling
that I was being shadowed. I was almost positive I
was being trailed. They would be after the second
half, I felt. So I made a dummy, and loafed about
all day waiting for a sign. I kept it up until to-night.
Then, when I actually found I was being followed,
every move I made, I — "

His voice trailed off and he caught at my arm again.

"See, he's on the move again! He's going, this
time. And that's the man! I want you to help me
watch him, watch every step and trick. And if there's

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 67

a second man, I'm going to get you to follow him,
while I stick to this one. It's not altogether for my-
self, remember; it's more for the whole Service!"

We were on our feet by this time, passing northward
along the asphalted walks that wound in and out be-
tween the trees.

"You mean this man's a sort of agent, a foreign
spy, after your naval secrets ?" I asked, as we watched
the figure in blue circle casually out toward Fifth
Avenue.

"That's what I've got to find out. And I'm going to
do it, if I have to follow him to hell and back !" was
the young officer's answer. Then he suddenly drew
up, with a whispered warning.

"You'd better go west, toward Broadway. Then
walk north into Fifth Avenue again, toward Brentano's
corner. I'll swing up Madison Avenue on the opposite
side of him, and walk west on Twenty-sixth Street.
Don't speak to me as we pass. But watch him, every
moment. And if there's a second man, follow him!"

A moment later I was sauntering westward toward
the old Hoffman House corner. As I approached the
avenue curb I saw the unperturbed figure in blue stop
beside the Farragut Monument on the northwest fringe
of Madison Square. I saw him take out a cigar, slowly
and deliberately strike a match on the stonework of
the exedra, and then as slowly and deliberately light
his cigar.

I felt, as I saw it, that it was some sort of a signal.
This suspicion grew stronger, when, a moment later,
I saw a woman step out of a near-by doorway. She

68 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

wore a plumed Gainsborough hat and a cream-colored
gown. Over her slender young shoulders, I further
made out, hung an opera cloak of delicate lacework.

She stood for a moment at the carriage step, as
though awaiting a car or taxi. Then she quickly-
crossed the avenue and, turning north, passed the wait-
ing man in blue. She passed him without a spoken
word.

But as the cream-colored figure drifted nonchalantly
by the broad-shouldered man I caught a fleeting
glimpse of something passing between them, a hint
of one hand catching a white packet from another. It
was a hint, and nothing more. But it was enough.

My first impulse, as I saw that movement, was to
circle quickly about and warn Palmer of what had
taken place. A moment's thought, however, showed
me the danger of this. And the young lieutenant, I
could see, had already changed his course, so that his
path southward through the center of the square
paralleled that of the other man now walking more
briskly along the avenue curb.

He had clearly stated that I was to watch any con-
federate. I had no intention to quibble over side-
issues. As I started northward, indeed, after that
mysterious figure in the Gainsborough hat and the
cream-colored gown, a most pleasurable and purpose-
ful tingle of excitement thrilled up and down my back-
bone.

I shadowed her as guardedly as I was able, follow-
ing her block by block as she hurried up the empty
thoroughfare that was now as quiet and lonely as a

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 69

glacial moraine. My one fear was that she would
reach the Waldorf, or some equally complex beehive
of human life, before I could overtake her. Once
there, I knew, she would be as completely lost as a
needle in a haystack.

She may have suspected me by this time, I felt, for
twice I saw her look back over her shoulder.

Then I suddenly stopped and ducked into a door-
way. For a moment after I saw a taxicab come clat-
tering into the avenue out of Thirty-third Street I dis-
covered that, at her repeated gesture, it was pulling up
beside the curb.

I stood well back in the shadow until she had
climbed into the seat, the door had slammed shut, and
the driver had turned his vehicle about and started
northward again. Then I skirted along the shop fronts,
darted across the street, and made straight for the
hotel cabstand and a taxi driver drowsily exhaling
cigarette smoke up toward the tepid midnight skies..
The bill I thrust into his hand took all the sleep out
of his body and ended the incense to the morning
stars.

"Up the avenue," I said as I clambered in. "And
follow that taxicab two blocks behind until it turns, and
then run up on it and wait."

It turned at Forty-second Street and went eastward
to Lexington Avenue. Then, doubling on its tracks-,
it swung southward again. We let it clatter on well
ahead of us. But as it turned suddenly westward, at
the corner of Twenty-third Street, we broke the speed
laws to draw once mere up to it. Then, as we crossed

yo THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Twenty-third Street, I told the driver to keep on
southward toward Gramercy Square. For I had caught
sight of the other taxi already drawn up at the curb
half-way between Lexington and Fourth Avenues.

A moment after we jolted across the car tracks I
slipped away from my cab and ran back to the cross-
street on foot. As I reached the corner I caught sight
of a figure in a cream-colored gown cross the sidewalk
and step quickly into the doorway of a shabby four-
storied building.

I had no time to study this building. It might have
been an antiquated residence turned into a cluster of
artist's studios, or a third-rate domicile of third-rate
business firms. My one important discovery was that
the door opened as I turned the knob and that I was
able quietly and quickly to step into the dark hallway.

I stood there in the gloom, listening intently. I
could hear the light and hurried click of shoe heels
on the bare tread-boards of the stairs. I waited and
listened and carefully counted these clicks. I knew,
as I did so, that the woman had climbed to the top
floor.

Then I heard the chink of metal, the sound of a key
thrust into a lock, and then the cautious closing of a
door. Then I found myself surrounded by nothing
but darkness and silence again.

I stood there in deep thought for a minute or two.
Then I groped my way cautiously to the foot' of the
s Lairs, found the heavy old-fashioned balustrade, and
slowly and silently climbed the stairway.

I did not stop until I found myself on the top floor

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 71

of that quiet and many-odored building. I paused
there, at a standstill, peering through the darkness that
surrounded me.

My search was rewarded by the discovery of one
thin streak of yellow light along what must have been
the bottom of a closed door. Just beyond that door,
I felt, my pursuit was to come to an end.

I groped my way to the wall and tiptoed quietly for-
ward. When I came to the door, I let my hand close
noiselessly about the knob. Then, cushioning it with
a firm grasp, I turned it slowly, inch by inch.

The door, I found, was locked. But inside the
room I could still hear the occasional click of shoe
heels and the indeterminate noises of an occupant mov-
ing quietly yet hurriedly about.

I stood there, puzzled, depressed by my first feeling
of frustration. Then I made out the vague oblong of
what must have been a window in the rear of a narrow
hall. I tiptoed back to this window, in the hope that
it might lead to something. I found, to my disappoint-
ment, that it was barred with half-inch iron rods. And
this meant a second defeat.

As I tested these rods I came on one that was not so
secure as the others. One quiet and steady wrench
brought an end-screw bodily out of the half-rotted
wood. Another patient twist or two entirely freed
the other end.

I found myself armed with' a four-foot bar, sharp-
ened wedge-like at each end for its screw head. So I
made my way silently back to the pencil of yellow
lieht and the locked door above it. I stood there

>2 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

listening for a minute or two. All I could hear was
the running of tap water and the occasional rustling
of a paper. So I quietly forced the edge of my rod in
between the door and its jamb, and as quietly levered
the end outward.

Something had to give under that strain. I was
woefully afraid that it would be the lock bar itself.
This I knew would go with a snap, and promptly be-
tray my movement. But as I increased the pressure I
could see that it was the socket screws that were slowly
yielding in the pine wood jamb.

I stopped and waited for some obliterating noise be-
fore venturing the last thrust that would send the
bolt free of the loosening socket. It came with the
sudden sound of steps and the turning off of the run-
ning tap. The door had been forced open and stood
an inch or two from the jamb before the steps sounded
again.

I waited, with my heart in my mouth, wondering
if anything had been overheard, if anything had been
discovered. It was only then, too, that the enormity
of my offense came home to me. I was a house-
breaker. I was playing the part of a midnight bur-
glar. I was facing a situation in which I had no imme-
diate interest. I was being confronted by perils I
had no means of comprehending. But I intended to
get inside that room, no matter what it cost.

I heard, as I stood there, the sound of a drawer be-
ing opened and closed. Then came a heel-click or
two on the wooden floor, and then an impatient and
quite audible sigh. There was no mistaking that

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE

sigh. It was as freighted with femininity as though
I had heard a woman's voice. And nothing was to
be gained by waiting. So I first leaned my iron rod
silently against the door corner. Then, taking a deep
breath, I stepped quickly and noiselessly into the
lighted room.

I stood there, close beside the partly opened door,
blinking a little at the sudden glare of light. There
was an appreciable interval before the details of the
scene could register themselves on my mind.

What I saw was a large and plainly furnished
room. Across one corner stood a rolltop desk, and
from the top of this I caught the glimmer of a tele-
phone transmitter. In the rear wall stood two old-
fashioned, low-silled windows. Against this wall, and
between these two windows, stood a black iron safe.

Before the open door of this safe, with her back
turned to me, was the woman in the cream-colored
gown. It was quite plain that she was not yet aware
of my presence.

She had thrown her hat and cape aside, and was at
the moment bending low over the dark maw of the
opened safe, reaching into its recesses with one white
and rounded arm. I stood there watching her, won-
dering what move would be most effective. I made
no sound ; of that I was certain. Yet some sixth sense
must have warned her of my presence. For without
rhyme or reason she suddenly stood erect, and swing-
ing about in her tracks, confronted me.

Her face, which had been a little flushed from stoop-
ing, went white. She stared at me without speaking,

74 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

her eyes wide with terrified wonder. I could see her
lips slowly part, as the shock of what she beheld began
to relax the jaw muscles along the olive-white cheek.

I stared back at her with a singularly disengaged
mind. I felt, in fact, very much at my ease, very
much the master of the situation. As an opponent, I
could see, she would be more than mysterious. She
would, in fact, be extremely interesting.

Her next move, however, threw a new complexion
on the situation. For she unexpectedly let her hand
dart out to the wall beside her, just behind the safe
top. As she did so, I could hear the snap of a switch
button; the next moment the light went out. It left
the room in impenetrable darkness.

I stood there, unprepared for any offensive or de-
fensive movement. Yet my enemy, I knew, was not
idle. As I stood peering unavailingly through the
gloom I could hear the quick thud of the safe door
being shut. Then came the distinct sound of a heavy
key being thrust and turned in a metal lock — the safe,
obviously, was of the old-fashioned key-tumbler make
— and then the noise of this key being withdrawn.
Then came a click or two of shoe heels, a rustle of
clothing, and a moment later the startlingly sharp
shattering of a window-pane.

The woman had deliberately locked the safe and
flung the key through the window! She had stolen
a march on me. She had defeated me in the first
movement of our encounter. My hesitation had been
a mistake, a costly mistake.

"Be so good as to turn on that light !" I commanded.

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 75

Not a sound came from the darkness.

"Turn on that light," I cried. "Turn on that light
or I'll fire! I'll rake every foot of this room!" And
with that I gave a very significant double click to my
cigarette case spring.

The light came on again, as suddenly as it went
out. I discreetly pocketed my cigarette case.

The woman was standing beside the safe, as before,
studying me with her wide and challenging eyes. But
all this time not a word had come from her lips.

"Sit down!" I commanded, as authoritatively and
yet as offhandedly as I could. It was then that she
spoke for the first time.

"Thank you, I prefer to stand!" was her answer.
She spoke calmly and distinctly and almost without
accent. Yet I felt the voice was, in some way, a for-
eign one. Some vague substratum of the exotic in the
carefully enunciated tones made me surmise that she
was either an Austrian or a Gallicized Hungarian, or
if not that, possibly a Polish woman.

"You will be here for some time," I hinted.

"And you?" she asked. I noticed an almost im-
perceptible shrug of her softly rounded shoulder. Rice
powder, I imagined, somewhat increased its general
effect of dead-whiteness.

"I'll be here until that safe is opened," was my re-
tort.

"That long?" she mocked.

"That long!" I repeated, exasperated at her slow
smile.

"Ah, then I shall sit down," she murmured as she

76 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

caught up the lace cape and adjusted it about her
shoulders. "For, believe me, that will be a very, very-
long time, monsieur!''

I watched her carefully as she crossed the room
and sank into a chair. She drew her cream-colored
train across her knees with frugal and studious delib-
erateness.

It suddenly flashed over me, as I watched her, that
her ruse might have been a double-barreled one. Ob-
liquity such as hers would have unseen convolutions.
It was not the key to the safe she had flung through
the window ! She would never have been so foolish.
It was a trick, a subterfuge. She still had that key
somewhere about her.

"And now what must I do?" she asked as she drew
the cloak closer about her shoulders.

"You can hand me over the key to that safe," was
my answer.

She could actually afford to laugh a little.

"That is quite impossible !"

"I want that key !" I insisted.

"Pardon, but is this not — dangerous?" she mildly
inquired. "Is it not so, to break into houses at mid-
night, and rob women?"

It was my turn to laugh.

"Not a bit of it," I calmly assured her. "And you
can judge if I'm frightened or not. There's something
much more dangerous than that!"

She was again studying me with her puzzled and
ever-narrowing eyes.

"Which means?" she prompted.

THE STOLEN VvrHEEL-CODE yy

"Well, for example, the theft of government naval
codes, among other things."

"You are very, very drunk," she retorted with her
quietly scoffing smile. "Or you are insane, quite in-
sane. May I not lock my jewels in my own safe? Ah,
I begin to see — this is a trick, that you may steal
from me !"

"Then why not send for the police?" I challenged,
pointing toward the telephone.

A look of guile crept into her studious eyes.

"You will permit that?" she asked.

"I invite it," was my answer.

"Then I shall call for help."

"Only from the police."

"Yes; I shall call for help," she repeated, crossing
to the telephone.

I leaned forward as she stood in front of it. I
caught her bare arm in my left hand, just below the
elbow. As I drew it backward it brought her body
against mine, pinning her other arm down close against
my side.

The thing was repugnant to me, but it was neces-
sary. As I pinioned her there, writhing and panting,
I deliberately thrust my right hand into the open bosom
of her gown. I was dimly conscious of a faint aura
of perfume, of a sense of warmth behind the soft and
lace-fringed corsage. But it was the key itself that
redeemed the rude assault and brought a gasp of re-
lief to my lips — the huge brass key, as big as an egg
beater.

"Lache!" I heard gasped into my ear.

78 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

The woman staggered to a chair, white to the lips ;
and for a moment or two I thought she was going to
faint.

"Oh, you dog!" she gasped, as she sat there panting
and staring at me with blazing eyes. "Cochon! Cur!"

But I paid little heed to her, for the wine of victory
was already coursing and tingling through my veins.

"You know, you can still call the police," I told
her as I faced the heavy black door of the safe. One
turn of the wrist, I knew, would bring me face to
face with my prize.

A sudden movement from the woman, as I stooped
over the safe door, brought me round in a flash. She
was on her feet and half-way across the room before
I could intercept her. And I was not any too gentle,
I'm afraid, for the excitement of the thing had gone
to my head.

That earlier assault at my hands seemed to have
intimidated her. I could see actual terror in her eyes
as I forced her back against the wall. She must have
realized her helplessness. She stared up into my face,
bewildered, desperate. There was something supple
and panther-like about her, something alluring and yet
disturbing. I could see what an effective weapon that
sheer physical beauty of hers might be, once its tiger-
ish menace had been fully sheathed.

"Wait!" she cried, catching at my arm. "If there
is anything you want I will give it to you."

"There are several things I want," was my uncom-
promising answer.

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 79

"But why should you want them?" she asked, still
clinging to my arm.

"It's my duty to take them," I replied, unconscious
of any mendacity. "That's what I'm sent here for!
That's why I've watched the man who gave you the
packet !"

"What packet?"

"The packet you took in Madison Square an hour
ago; the packet you locked in this safe! And if you
like I'll tell you just what that packet is!"

"This is some mistake, some very sad mistake," she
had the effrontery to declare. Her arm still clung to
me. Her face was very close to mine as she went
on. "I can explain everything, if you will only give
me the time — everything ! I can show you where you
are wrong, and how you may suffer through a mistake
like this!"

"We can talk all that over later," I promptly told
her, for I was beginning to suspect that her object now
was merely to kill time, to keep me there, in the hope
of some chance discovery. I peered about the room,
wondering what would be the quickest way out of
my dilemma.

"What are you going to do?" she asked as she
watched me shove a chair over against the wall, di-
rectly beside the safe.

"I'm going to seat you very comfortably in this
very comfortable chair," I informed her, "and in this
equally comfortable corner directly behind the safe
door. And at the first trick or sign of trouble, I'm

So THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

afraid I'm going to make a hole right through one of
those nice white shoulders of yours!"

She sat down without being forced into the chair.
Her alert and ever-moving eyes blazed luminously
from her dead-white face. I knew, as I thrust the huge
key in the safe lock and turned it back that she would
have to be watched, and watched every moment of the
time.

I had already counted on the safe door, as it swung
back, making a barrier across the corner in which she
sat. This I found to be the case. I took a second pre-
caution, however, by shoving a tilted chair-back firmly
in under the edge of the safe lock.

I knew, as I stooped before the open strong box,
that she could make no sudden move without my be-
ing conscious of it. I also knew that time was pre-
cious. So I reached into the depths of the almost
empty safe and lifted out a number of papers neatly
held together by a rubber band.

These I placed on the safe top. Then I snapped off
the band and examined the first document. On the
back of it, neatly inscribed in French, was the emi-
nently satisfactory legend : "Plans and Specifications ;
Bs. Lake Torpedo Company, Bridgeport." The next
packet was a blue print of war projectiles, and on the
back of it was written: "Model Tracings, through
Jenner, from the Bliss & Company Works — 18 — Self-
Projectors."

The third packet carried no inscription. But as
I opened it I saw at a glance what it was. I knew
in a moment that I held before me the governmental

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 81

wheel-code of wireless signals in active service. It
was the code that had been stolen from Lieutenant
Palmer. The fourth and last paper, I found, was
plainly the dummy which had been taken from the
same officer that night in Madison Square. The case
was complete. The chase was over and done.

"In the cash drawer, on the right, you will find
more," quietly remarked the young woman watching
me from the side of the safe.

"It's locked," I said, as I tugged at the drawer knob.
I stood erect at her sudden laugh.

"Why not take everything?" she asked, with her
scoffing smile.

And I saw no reason why I shouldn't; though a
suspicion crossed my mind that this might be still
another ruse to kill time. If such it was, I faced it
at once, for I sent my boot heel promptly in against
the wooden cash drawer, smashing it at one blow.

She had been mistaken, or had deliberately lied, for
the drawer was empty. And I told her so, with con-
siderable heat.

"Ah, we all make mistakes, I think," she murmured
with her enigmatic shrug.

"What I want to know," I said as I banded the
four papers together and thrust them down in my
pocket, "is just how you got that first code from my
young friend the lieutenant?"

She smiled again, a little wearily, as I swung the
safe door shut and locked it. She did not rise from
the chair. But as I stood confronting her, something
in my attitude, apparently, struck her as distinctly

82 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

humorous. For she broke into a sudden and deeper
ripple of laughter. There was, however, something
icy and chilling in it. Her eyes now seemed more
veiled. They had lost their earlier look of terror. Her
face seemed to have relaxed into softer contours.

"Would you like to know?" she said, lifting her
face and looking with that older, half-mocking glance
into my own. She was speaking slowly and delib-
erately, and I could see the slight shrug she gave to
one panther-like shoulder. "Would I be so out of
place in a ballroom? Ah, have not more things than
hearts been lost when a man dances with a woman?"

"I see — you mean you stole it, at the Plaza?"

"Not at all, monsieur!" she murmured languidly
back. Then she drew a deeper breath, and sat more
rigid in her straight-back chair.

Something about her face, at that moment, puzzled
me. It seemed to hold some latent note of confidence.
The last trace of fear had fled from it. There was
something strangely like triumph, muffled triumph,
in it.

An arrow of apprehension shot through me, as I
stooped peering into her shadowy eyes. It went
through my entire body, sharp as an electric shock.
It brought me wheeling suddenly about with my back
to her and my face to the open room.

Then I understood. I saw through it all, in one
tingling second. For there, facing me, stood the figure
of a man in navy blue. It was the same figure that
I had followed through the square.

But now there was nothing secretive or circuitous

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 83

about his attitude. It was quite the other way ; for as
he stood there he held a blue-barreled revolver in his
hand. And I could see, only too plainly, that it was
leveled directly at me. The woman's ruse had worked.
I had wasted too much time. The confederate for
whom she was plainly waiting had come to her rescue.

The man took three or four steps farther into the
room. His revolver was still covering me. I heard a
little gasp from the woman as she rose to her feet.
I took it for a gasp of astonishment.

"You are going to kill him?" she cried in German.

"Haven't I got to?" asked back the man. He spoke
in English and without an accent. "Don't you under-
stand he's a safe-breaker? He's broken into this
house? So! He's caught in the act — he's shot in self-
defense !"

I watched the gun barrel. The man's calm words
seemed to horrify the woman at my side. But there
was not a trace of pity in her voice as she spoke again.

"Wait!" she cried.

"Why?" asked the man with the gun.

"He has everything — the code, the plans, every-
thing."

"Get them!" commanded the man.

"But he's armed," she explained.

A sneer crossed the other's impassive face.

"What if he is? Take his gun; take everything!"

The woman stepped close to where I stood. Again
I came within the radius of her perfumes. I could
even feel her breath on my face. Her movements
were more than ever panther-like as she went through

84 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

my pockets, one by one. Yet her flashing and dex-
trous hands found no revolver, for the simple reason
there was none to find. This puzzled and worried her.

"Hurry up!'' commanded the man covering me.

She stepped back and to one side, with the packet
in her hand.

"Now close the windows!" ordered the man.

My heart went down in my boots as I heard the thud
of that second closed window. There was going to
be no waste of time.

I thought of catching the woman and holding her
shield-like before me. I thought of the telephone; the
light-switch ; the window. But they all seemed hopeless.

The woman turned away, holding her hands over
her ears. The incongruous thought flashed through
me that two hours before I had called the city flat and
stale; and here, within a rifle shot of my own door, I
was standing face to face with death itself !

"Look here," I cried, much as I hated to, "what do
you get out of this ?"

"Yoti!" said the man.

"And what good will that do?"

"It'll probably shut your mouth, for one thing!"

"But there are other mouths," I cried. "And I'm
afraid they'll have a great deal to say."

"I'm ready for them!" was his answer.

I could see his arm raise a little, and straighten out
as it raised. The gun barrel was nothing but a black
"O" at the end of my line of vision. I felt my heart
stop, for I surmised what the movement meant.

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE 85

Then I laughed outright, aloud, and altogether fool-
ishly and hysterically.

The strain had been too much for me, and the snap
bf the release had come too suddenly, too unexpect-
edly. I could see the man with the gun blink per-
plexedly, for a second or two, and then I could see the
tightening of his thin-lipped mouth. But that was not
all I had seen.

For through the half-closed door I had caught sight
of the slowly raised iron rod, the very rod I had
wrenched from the outer hall window. I had seen its
descent at the moment I realized the finality in those
quickly tightening lips.

It struck the arm on its downward sweep. But it
was not in time to stop the discharge of the revolver.
The report thundered through the room as the bullet
ripped and splintered into the pine of the floor. At
the same moment the discharged firearm went spinning
across the room, and as the man who held it went down
with the blow, young' Palmer himself swung toward
me through the drifting smoke.

As he did so, I turned to the woman with her
hands still pressed to her ears. With one fierce jerk
I tore the rubber-banded packet of papers from her
clutch.

"But the code?" gasped Palmer, as he tugged crazily
at the safe door.

I did not answer him, for a sudden movement from
the woman arrested my attention. She had stooped
and caught up the fallen revolver. The man in blue,

86 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

rolling" over on his hip, was drawing a second gun
from his pocket.

"Quick !" I called to Palmer as I swung him by the
armpit and sent him catapulting out through the smoke
to the open door. "Quick — and duck low!"

The shots came together as we stumbled against the
stairhead.

"Quick!" I repeated, as I pulled him after me.

"But the code?" he cried.

"I've got it!" I called out to him as we went pant-
ing and plunging down through that three-tiered well
of darkness to the street and liberty. "I've got it —
I've got everything!"

CHAPTER IV

THE OPEN DOOR

44 O HALL I call the car, sir?" asked the solicitous-

•^ eyed Benson, covertly watching me as I made
ready for the street.

"No," was my studiously detached retort, "I intend
to walk."

"Latreille was asking, sir, if you would care to have
the car laid up."

The significance of that bland suggestion did not
escape me. And it did not add to my serenity of mind.

"Just what business is that of Latreille's ?" I de-
manded, with a prickle of irritation. My patient-eyed
old butler averted his glance, with a sigh which he
didn't seem quite able to control.

"And at the end of the month," I went on, "I in-
tend to discharge that man. I'm tired of his inso-
lences."

"Yes, sir," Benson softly yet fervently agreed.

My nerves were on edge, I knew, but I wasn't look-
ing for sympathy from my hired help. And when I
swung the door shut behind me I am afraid it was a
movement far from noiseless.

I was glad to get out into the open, glad to get
away from old Benson's commiserative eyes, and have
space about me, and cool air to breathe, and uncounted
mile? of pavement to weary my legs on.

I noticed, as I turned into Fifth Avenue, that the

SS THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

moving finger of light on the Metropolitan clock-dial
pointed to an hour past midnight. So I veered about
that delta of idleness, where the noontide turbulence of
Broadway empties its driftwood into the quietness of
the square, and pursued my way up the avenue.

No one can claim to know New York who does not
know its avenues in those mystical small hours that fall
between the revolving street-sweeper and the robin-
call of the first morning paper. Fifth Avenue, above
all her sisters, then lies as though tranquillized by
Death, as calm as the Coliseum under its Italian moon-
light. She seems, under the stars, both medievalized
and spiritualized. She speaks then in an intimate
whisper foreign to her by day, veiling her earthlier
loquacity in a dreaming wonder, softening and sweet-
ening like a woman awaiting her lover. The great
steel shafts enclosed in their white marble become tur-
rets crowned with mystery. And the street-floor it-
self, as clean and polished as a ballroom, seems to
undulate off into outer kingdoms of romance. An
occasional lonely motor-car, dipping up its gentle
slopes like a ship treading a narrow sea-lane buoyed
with pearls as huge as pumpkins, only accentuates the
midnight solitude.

So up this dustless and odorless and transmuted
avenue I wandered, as passively as a policeman on his
beat, asking of the quietness when and how I might
capture that crown of weariness known as sleep.

I wandered on, mocked at by a thousand drawn
blinds, taunted by a thousand somnolently closed doors.
I felt, in that city of rest, as homeless as a prairie

THE OPEN DOOR 89

wolf. The very smugness of those veiled and self-
satisfied house-fronts began to get on my nerves. The
very taciturnity of the great silent hostelries irritated
me; everything about them seemed so eloquent of an
interregnum of rest, of relaxed tension, of invisible
reservoirs of life being softly and secretly filled.

Yet as I came to the open width of the Plaza, and
saw the wooded gloom of Central Park before me, I
experienced an even stronger feeling of disquiet. There
seemed something repugnant in its autumnal solitudes.
That vague agoraphobia peculiar to the neurasthenic
made me long for the contiguity of my own kind, how-
ever unconscious of me and my wandering they might
remain. I found myself, almost without thought, veer-
ing off eastward into one of the city's side-streets.

Yet along this lateral valley of quietness I wandered
as disconsolately as before. What impressed me now
was the monotonv of the house-fronts which shoul-
dered together, block by block. Each front seemed of
the same Indiana limestone, of the same dull gray, as
though, indeed, the whole district were a quarry check-
er-boarded by eroding cross-currents out of the self-
same rock. Each tier of windows seemed backed by
the same blinds, each street-step barricaded by the same
door. I stopped and looked up, wondering if behind
those neutral-tinted walls and blinds were lives as bald
and monotonous as the materials that screened them.
I wondered if an environment so without distinction
would not actually evolve a type equally destitute of
individuality.

I turned where I stood, and was about to pass dif-

90 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

fidently on, when one of the most unexpected things
that can come to a man at midnight happened to me.

Out of a clear sky, without a note or movement of
warning, there suddenly fell at my feet a heavy bundle.

Where it came from I had no means of telling. The
house above me was as silent and dark as a tomb.
The street was as empty as a church. Had the thing-
been a meteor out of a star-lit sky, or a wildcat leap-
ing from a tree-branch, it could not have startled me
more.

I stood looking at it, in wonder, as it lay beside the
very area-railing on which my hand had rested. Then
I stepped back and leaned in over this railing, more
clearly to inspect the mystery. Whatever it was, it
had fallen with amazingly little noise. There was no
open window to explain its source. There had been no
wind to blow it from an upper-story sill. There was
no movement to show that its loss had been a thing
of ponderable import. Yet there it lay, a mystery
which only the deep hours of the night, when the
more solemnly imaginative faculties come into play,
could keep from being ridiculous.

I stood there for several minutes blinking down at
it, as though it were a furred beast skulking in a cor-
ner. Then I essayed a movement which, if not above
the commonplace, was equally related to common sense.
I stepped in through the railing and picked up the
parcel. I turned it over several times. Then I sat
down on the stone steps and deliberately untied the
heavy cord that baled it together.

I now saw why I had thought of that falling bundle

THE OPEN DOOR 91

as an animal's leap. It was completely wrapped
in what I took to be a Russian-squirrel motor-coat.
The tightly tied fur had padded the parcel's fall.

Enclosed in that silk-lined garment I found a small-
er bundle, swathed about with several lengths of what
seemed to be Irish point lace. Inside this again were
other fragments of lacework. Through these I thrust
my exploring ringers with all the alert curiosity of
a child investigating a Christmas-tree cornucopia.

There, in the heart of the parcel, I found a collection
which rather startled me. The first thing I examined
was a chamois bag filled with women's rings, a dozen
or more of them, of all kinds. I next drew out a
Florentine repousse hand-bag set with turquoises and
seed-pearls, and then a moonstone necklace, plainly of
antique Roman workmanship. Next came a black and
white Egyptian scarab, and then, of all things, a snuff-
box. It was oval and of gold, enameled en plein with
a pastoral scene swarming with plump pink Cupids.
Even in that uncertain light it required no second
glance to assure me that I was looking down at a rare
and beautiful specimen of Louis XV jeweler's art.
Then came a small photograph in an oval gold frame.
The remainder of the strange collection was made up
of odds and ends of jewelry and a leather-covered
traveling-clock stamped with gilt initials.

I did not take the time to look more closely over
this odd assortment of valuables, for it now seemed
clear that I had stumbled on something as disturbing
as it was unexpected. The only explanation of an oth-
erwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker

92 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

was busily operating somewhere behind the gray-stone
wall which I faced.

The house behind that wall seemed to take on no
new color at this discovery. Its inherent sobriety, its
very rectangularity of outline, appeared a contradiction
of any claim that it might be harboring a figure either
picturesque or picaresque. It was no old mansion
stained with time, dark with memories and tears. It
carried no atmosphere of romance, no suggestion of
old and great adventures, of stately ways and noble
idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates,
of silence and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence
of unrecorded history. It was nothing more than a
new and narrow and extremely modern house, in the
very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and
as obvious in architecture as the warehouses along an
old-world water-front, as bare of heart as it was bald
of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of the day
of utility. It could no more have been a harbor for
romance, I told myself, than the stone curb in front
of it could be translated into a mountain-precipice
threaded with brigand-paths.

Yet I went slowly up those unwelcoming stone steps
with the bundle under my arm. The thief at work in-
side the house, I assumed, had simply tied the heavier
part of his loot together and dropped it from a quietly
opened window, to be gathered as quickly up, once he
had effected his escape to the street. The sudden after-
thought that it might have been dropped for a con-
federate caused me to look carefully eastward and
then as carefully westward. But not a sign of life

THE OPEN DOOR 93

met my gaze. My figure standing puzzled before that
unknown door was the only figure in the street.

Heaven only knows what prompted me to reach out
and try that door. It was, I suppose, little more than
the habit of a lifetime, the almost unconscious habit
of turning a knob when one finds oneself confronted
by a door that is closed. The thing that sent a little
thrill of excitement through my body was that the
knob turned in my hand, that the door itself stood
unlocked.

I stooped down and examined this lock as best I
could in the uncertain light. I even ran a caressing
finger along the edge of the door. There was no evi-
dence that it had been jimmied open, just as there was
nothing to show that the lock itself did not stand in-
tact and uninjured. A second test of the knob, how-
ever, showed me that the door was unmistakably open.

My obvious course, at such a time, would have been
to wait for a patrolman or to slip quietly awTay and
send word in to police headquarters. But, as I have
already said, no man is wholly sane after midnight.
Subliminal faculties, ancestral perversions, dormant
and wayward tendencies, all come to the surface, emerg-
ing like rats about a sleeping mansion. And crowning
these, again, was my own neurasthenic craving for
activity, my hunger for the narcotizing influence of
excitement.

And it has its zest of novelty, this stepping into an
unknown and unlighted house at three o'clock in the
morning. That novelty takes on a razor-edge when
you have fairly good evidence that some one who has

94 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

no business there has already preceded you into that
house.

So as I stepped inside and quietly closed the door
after me, I moved forward with the utmost care. Some
precautionary sixth sense told me the place was not
unoccupied. Yet the darkness that surrounded me
was absolute. Not a sound or movement came to my
ears as I stood there listening, minute after minute.
So I crept deeper into the gloom.

My knowledge of that stereotyped class of residence
provided me with a very fair idea of where the stair-
way ought to stand. Yet it took much prodding and
groping and pawing about before I came to it. One
flicker of a match, I knew, would have revealed the
whole thing to me. But to strike a light, under the
circumstances, would be both foolish and dangerous.
No house dog, I felt, would interrupt my progress;
the mere remembrance of the intruder above me set my
mind at rest on this point.

I came to a stop at the head of the first stairway,
puzzled by the completeness of the quiet which encom-
passed me. I directed my attention to each quarter
of the compass, point by point.

But I might have been locked and sealed in a cis-
tern, so complete was the silence, so opaque was the
blackness. Yet I felt that nothing was to be gained
by staying where I was.

So I groped and shuffled my way onward, rounding
the banister and advancing step by step up the second
stairway. This, I noticed, was both narrower and
steeper than the first. I was also not unconscious

THE OPEN DOOR 95

of the fact that it was leading me into a zone of
greater danger, for the floor I was approaching, I
knew, would be the sleeping floor.

I was half-way up the stairway when something
undefined brought me to a sudden stop. Some noc-
turnal adeptness of instinct warned me of an imminent
presence, of a menace that had not yet disclosed itself.

Once more I came to a stop, straining my eyes
through the darkness. Nothing whatever was to be
seen. Along the floor of the hallway just above my
head, however, passed a small but unmistakable sound.
It was the soft frou-frou of a skirt, a skirt of silk or
satin, faintly rustling as a woman walked the full
length of the hall. I had just made a mental register
of the deduction that this woman was dressed in street-
clothes, and was, accordingly, an intruder from out-
side, rather than a sleeper suddenly awakened, when
a vague suffusion of light filled the space above me
and was as quickly quenched again.

I knew the moment I heard the soft thud of wood
closing against wood, that a door had been quietly
opened and as quietly closed again. The room into
which that door led must have been faintly lighted,
for it was the flowering of this refracted light that
had caught my attention.

I went silently up the stairs, step by step, listening
every now and then as I advanced. Once I reached
the floor level I kept close to the wall, feeling my way
along until I came to the door I wanted.

There was no way whatever of determining what
stood on the other side of that door, without opening

96 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

it. I knew what risks I ran in attempting any such
movement. But I decided it was worth the risk.

Now, if a door is opened slowly, if every quarter-
inch of movement is measured and guarded, it can, as
a rule, be done noiselessly. I felt quite sure there
was not one distinguishable sound as I cautiously
turned that bronze knob and even more cautiously
worked back the door, inch by inch.

I came to a stop when it stood a little more than a
loot from the jamb. I did not, at first, attempt to
sidle in through the aperture; that would have been
needlessly reckless. I stood there waiting, anticipat-
ing the effect the door-movement might have had on
any occupant of the room, had it been seen.

While I waited I also studied that portion of the
chamber which fell within my line of vision. I saw
enough to convince me that the room was a bed-
room. I could also make out that it was large, and
from the rose-pink of its walls to the ivory-white
of its furnishings it stood distinctly feminine in its

note.

There was, I felt, a natural limit to that period of
experimental inaction. The silence lengthened. The
crisis of tedium approached, arrived, and passed. Au-
daciousness reconquered me, and I actually advanced a
little into the room. Steadying myself with one hand
on the door-frame, I thrust my body through the nar-
row aperture until the whole four walls lay subject
to my line of vision.

The first thing I noticed was a green-shaded elec-
tric lamp burning on what seemed to be a boudoir

THE OPEN DOOR 97

writing-table. It left the rest of the room in little
more than twilight. But after the utter darkness
through which I had groped, this faint illumination
was quite adequate for my purposes.

I let my gaze pivot about the room, point by point.
Then, if I did not gasp, there was at least a sudden
and involuntary cessation of breathing, for standing
beside a second door at the farther end of the room
was a woman dressed in black. On her head was a
black hat, round which a veil was tightly wound,
the front of it apparently thrust up hurriedly from
her face. But what startled me was the fact that
both her attitude and her position seemed such an
exact duplication of my own.

With one hand, I noticed, she clung to the frame of
the door. With the other hand she held back a heavy
portiere, which hung across this frame. I could see
the white half -oval of her intent face as she stood
there. Something about her suggested not the spy-
ing intruder so much as the secret listener. Her atten-
tion seemed directed toward some object which her
eyes were not seeing. It appeared as though she
stood waiting to overhear a sound which meant much
to her.

As I peered past her through the dim light I could
catch a faint glimmer of green and white marble, with
here and there the high-lights reflected from polished
nickel. I knew then that the room into which she was
peering was a bathroom, and this bathroom, I con-
cluded, opened on a second sleeping-chamber which
held the raison d'etre of her motionless apprehension.

98 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I directed my glance once more at the woman.
Something almost penitential in her attitude brought
the sudden thought to my mind that she had commit-
ted a crime at the mere memory of which she was
already morally stricken. Unexpected discovery, I
began to suspect, had driven her to an extreme which
she was already beginning to regret. There was,
in fact, something so pregnant and portentous in
that unchanging attitude of hers that I began to feel it
would be a mean surrender on my part to evade the
issue in which I had already risked so much. So I
moved silently into the room, crossing it without a
sound, until I dropped into a high-backed fanteuil
upholstered in embossed and pale-green leather.

I sat there studying her, unaccountably at my ease,
fortified by the knowledge that I was the observer
of an illicit intrusion and that my own presence, if
impertinent, might at least be easily explained. I saw
her sigh deeply and audibly, and then gently close the
door, dropping the curtain as she turned slowly away.

I watched her as she crossed to the dresser, looked
over the toilet articles on it, and then turned away.
She next skirted a heavy cheval-mirror, crossed to the
writing-table with her quick yet quietly restless move-
ments, and from this table caught up what seemed to
be a metal paper-knife. She moved on to an ivory
and mother-of-pearl desk, which, apparently, she al-
ready knew to be locked. For after one short glance
toward the curtained door again, she inserted the edge
of the knife in a crack of this desk and slowly pried
on the lock-bar that held it shut.

THE OPEN DOOR 99

I saw her second apprehensive glance toward the
curtained door as the lock sprung with a snap. She
sank into a chair before it, breathing quickly, obviously
waiting a minute or two to make sure she had not
been overheard. Then with quick and dextrous fingers
she rummaged through the desk. Just what she swept
from one of the drawers into her open hand-bag
I could not distinguish. But I plainly saw the pack-
age of letters which she took up in her hand, turned
over and over, then carefully and quietly secreted
within the bosom of her dress. She looked deeper
into the desk, examined an additional paper or two
which appeared not to interest her, and slowly swung
back the cover.

Then she slowly rose to her feet, standing beside
the desk. She let her gaze, as she stood there, wander
about the room. I could distinctly see the look on
her face, the hungry and unhappy look of unsatisfied
greed. I sat motionless, waiting for that expression
to change. I knew that it must change, for it would
be but a moment or two before she caught sight of me.
But I had seen enough. I felt sure of my position —
in fact, I found a wayward relish in it, an almost
enjoyable anticipation of the shock which I knew the
discovery of my presence there would bring to her.
I even exulted a little in that impending dramatic
crisis, rejoicing in the slowness with which the inevit-
able yet epochal moment was approaching.

Her eyes must have dwelt on my figure for several
seconds before her mind became convinced of my ac-
tual presence there. She did not scream, as I thought

ioo THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

she was about to do when I saw one terrified hand go
up to her partly open lips. Beyond that single hand-
movement there was no motion whatever from her. She
simply stood mere, white-faced and speechless, staring
at me out of wide and vacant eyes.

"Good evening — or, rather, good morning!" I said,
with all the calmness at my command.

For one brief second she glanced back toward the
curtained door, as though behind it lay a sleeper my
words might awaken. Then she stared at me again.

She did not speak. She did not even move. The
intent and staring face, white as a half -moon in a misty
sky, seemed floating in space. The faint light of
the room swallowed up the lines of her black-clad
figure, enisling the face in the unbroken gloom of a
Rembrandt-like background, making it stand out as
though it were luminous.

It was a face well worth studying. What first
struck me was its pallor. Across this the arched,
faintly interrogative eyebrows gave it a false air of
delicacy. The eyes themselves had a spacious clarity
which warned me my enemy would not be without a
capable enough mind, once she regained possession
of her wits. Her mouth, no longer distorted by terror,
was the nervous, full-lipped mouth of a once ardent
spirit touched with rebellion.

She was, I could see, no every-day thief of the
streets, no ordinary offender satisfied with mean and
petty offenses. There would, I told myself, always be
a largeness about her wrong-doing, a sinister bril-
liance in her illicit pursuits. And even while I decided

THE OPEN DOOR 101

this, I was forced to admit that it was not precisely
terror I was beholding on her face. It seemed to merge
into something more like a sense of shame, the same
speechless horror which I might have met with had I
intruded on her bodily nakedness. I could see that she
was even beginning to resent my stare of curiosity-
Then, for the first time, she spoke.

"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was low;
in it was the quaver of the frightened woman reso-
lutely steeling herself to courage.

"That's a question you're first going to answer for
me," was my calmly deliberate retort.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded, still
confronting me from the same spot. I remembered
the bundle of loot which I had dropped just outside
the door.

"I can answer that more easily than you can," I
replied, with a slight head-movement toward the
broken desk-top.

Once more her glance went back to the curtained
door. Then she studied me from head to foot, each
sartorial detail and accessory of clothing, hat, gloves,
and shoes, as though each must figure in the resolution
of some final judgment.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

I preferred to leave that question unanswered.

"What do you intend to do?" she demanded, once
more searching my face.

I resented the way in which she anticipated my own
questions. I could see, from the first, that she was
going to be an extraordinarily adept and circuitous

102 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

person to handle. I warned myself that I would have
to be ready for every trick and turn.

"What do you suppose I'm going to do?" I
equivocated, looking for some betraying word to put
me on firmer ground. I could see that she was slow-
ly regaining her self-possession.

"You have no right in this house," she had the
brazenness to say to me.

"Have you?" I quickly retorted. She was silent for
a second or two.

"No," she admitted, much as she would like to have
claimed the contrary.

"Of course not! And I imagine you realize what
your presence here implies, just as what your dis-
covery here entails?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"And I think you have the intelligence to under-
stand that I'm here for motives somewhat more dis-
interested than your own?"

"What are they?" she demanded, letting her com-
bative eyes meet mine.

"That," I calmly replied, "can wait until you've ex-
plained yourself."

"I've nothing to explain."

There was a newer note in her voice again — one
of stubbornness. I could see that the calmness with
which I pretended to regard the whole affair was a
source of bewilderment to her.

"You've got to explain," was my equally obdurate
retort.

Her next pose was one of frigidity.

THE OPEN DOOR 103

"You are quite mistaken. We have nothing what-
ever to do with each other."

"Oh, yes we have. And I'm going to prove it."

"How?"

"By putting an end to this play-acting."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It was meant for one."

"What right have you to threaten me?"

She looked about as she spoke, almost wearily.
Then she sank into the chair that stood beside the
ravaged writing-desk. It was all diverting enough,
but I was beginning to lose patience with her.

"I'm tired of all this side-stepping," I told her.
An answering look of anger flashed from her eyes.

"I object to your presence here," she had the
effrontery to exclaim.

"You mean, I suppose, that I'm rather interfering
with your night's operations?"

"Those operations," she answered in a fluttering
dignity, "are my own affairs."

"Of course they are!" I scoffed. "They have to be!
But you should have kept them your own affairs.
When you drop a bundle of swag out of a window
you shouldn't come so perilously near to knocking a
man's hat off."

"A bundle of swag?" she echoed, with such a precise
imitation of wonder that I could plainly see she was
going to be the astutest of liars.

"The loot you intended carrying off," I calmly ex-
plained. "The stuff you dropped down beside the
house-step, to be ready for your getaway."

104 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"My what?"

:'Your escape. And it was rather clever."

"I dropped nothing," she protested, with a fine pre-
tense of bewilderment on her face.

"Nor let it roll quietly off a front window-ledge?"
I suggested.

"I was near no window — it would be impossible
for me to open a window," she protested. Her words
in themselves were a confession.

"You seem to know this house pretty well," I re-
marked.

"I ought to — it's my own," was her quick retort.

"It's your own ?" I repeated, amazed at the woman's
mendacity.

"It was my own," she corrected.

I peered quickly about the room. It held three
doors, one behind the woman, opening into the bath-
room, a second opening into the hallway, and a third
to the rear, which plainly opened into a clothes-closet.
There had been too much of this useless and foolish
argument.

"Since your claim to proprietorship is so strong," I
said as I crossed to the hall door, and, after locking
it, pocketed the key, "there are certain features of it
I want you to explain to me."

"What do you mean?" she asked, once more on
her feet.

"I want to know," I said, moving toward the
curtained door beside her, "just who or what is in
that front room?"

The look of terror came back to her white face.

THE OPEN DOOR 105

She even stood with her back against the door, as
though to keep me from opening it, making an in-
stinctive gesture for silence as I stood facing her.

"I'm going to find out what is in that room," I
proclaimed, unmoved by the agony I saw written on her
guilty face.

"Oh, believe me," she said, in supplicatory tones, a
little above a whisper, "it will do no good. It will only
make you sorry you interfered in this."

"But you've made it my duty to interfere."

"No; no; you're only blundering into something
where you can do no good, where you have no right."

"Then I intend to blunder into that room!" And
I tore the portiere from her grasp and flung it to one
side.

"Wait," she whispered, white-faced and panting
close beside me. "I'll tell you everything. I'll ex-
plain it — everything."

The tragic solemnity of that low-toned relinquish-
ment brought me up short. It was my turn to be
bewildered by an opponent I could not understand.

"Sit down," she said, with a weary and almost im-
perious movement of the hand as she advanced into
the room and again sank into the chair beside the
writing-desk.

"Now what is it you want to know?" she asked,
with only too obvious equivocation. Her trick to gain
time exasperated me.

"Don't quibble and temporize that way," I cried.
"Say what you've got to, and say it quick."

She directed at me a look which I resented, a look

io6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

of scorn, of superiority, of resignation in the face of
brutalities which I should never have subjected her to.
Yet, when she spoke again her voice was so calm as
to seem almost colorless.

"I said this was my home — and it's true. This was
once my room. Several weeks ago I left it."

"Why?" I inquired, resenting the pause which was
plainly giving her a chance to phrase ahead of her
words.

"I quarreled with my husband. I went away. I
was angry. I — I — There's no use explaining what
it was about."

"You've got to explain what it was about," I in-
sisted.

"You couldn't possibly understand. It's impossible
to explain," she went quietly on. "I discharged a
servant who was not honest. Then he tried to black-
mail me. He lied about me. I had been foolish, in-
discreet, anything you care to call it. But the lie he
told was awful, unbelievable. That my husband should
ask me to disprove it was more than I could endure.
We quarreled, miserably, hopelessly. I went away. I
felt it would be humiliating to stay under the same
roof with him."

"Wait," I interposed, knowing the weak link was
sure to present itself in time. "Where is your hus-
band now?"

She glanced toward the curtained door.

"He's in that room asleep," she quietly replied.

"And knowing him to be asleep you came to clean
out the house?" I promoted.

THE OPEN DOOR 107

"No," she answered without anger. "But when
service was begun for an interlocutory decree I knew
I could never come back openly. There were certain
things of my own I wanted very much."

"And just how did you get into the house?"

"The one servant I could trust agreed to throw off
the latch after midnight, to leave the door unlocked
for me when I knew I would never be seen."

"Then why couldn't that trusted servant have se-
cured the things, these things you came after? With-
out all this foolish risk of your forcing your way
into a house at midnight?"

Her head drooped a little.

"I wanted to see my husband," was the quiet-toned
response. Just how, she did not explain. I had to
admit to myself that it was very good acting. But
it was not quite convincing; and the case against her
was too palpably clear.

"This is a fine cock-and-bull story," I calmly de-
clared. "But just how are you going to make me
believe it?"

"You don't have to believe it," was her impassive
answer. "I'm only telling you what you demanded
to know."

"To know, yes — but how am I to know ?"

She raised her hand with a movement of listless
resignation.

"If you go to the top drawer of that dresser you
will see my photograph in a silver frame next to one of
my husband. That will show you at a glance."

For just a moment it flashed through me as I

10S THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

crossed the room that this might be a move to give
her time for some attempted escape. But I felt, on
second thought, that I was master enough of the
situation to run the risk. And here, at least, was a
point to which she could be most definitely pinned
down.

"The other drawer," she murmured as my hand
closed on the fragile ivory-tinted knob. I moved on
to the second drawer and opened it. I had thrust an
interrogative finger down into its haphazard clutter of
knick-knacks, apparently thrown together by a hurried
and careless hand, when from the other end of the
room came a quick movement which seemed to curdle
the blood in my veins. It brought me wheeling about,
with a jump that was both grotesque and galvanic.

I was just in time to see the figure that darted out
through the suddenly opened door of the clothes-closet.

I found myself confronted by a man, a thin-lipped,
heavy-jawed man of about thirty-five, with black pin-
point pupils to his eyes. He wore a small-rimmed
derby hat and a double-breasted coat of blue cheviot.
But it was not his clothes that especially interested
me. What caught and held my attention was the
ugly, short-barreled revolver which was gripped in
the fingers of his right hand. This revolver, I noticed,
was unmistakably directed at me as he advanced into
the room. I could not decide which was uglier, the
blue-metaled gun or the face of the man behind it.

"Get back against that wall," he commanded. "Then
throw up your hands. Get 'em up quick!"

I had allowed her to trap me after all ! I had even

THE OPEN DOOR 109

let myself half-believe that pleasant myth of the slum-
bering husband in the next room. And all the while
she was guarding this unsavory-looking confederate
who, ten to one, had been slinking about and working
his way into a wall-safe even while I was wasting
time with diverting but costly talk.

And with that gun-barrel blinking at me I had no
choice in the matter — I was compelled to assume the
impotent and undignified attitude of a man supplicating
the unanswering heavens. The woman turned and
contemplated the newTcomer, contemplated him with a
fine pretense of surprise.

"Hobbs," she cried, "how did you get here?"

"You shut up!" he retorted over his shoulder.

"What are you doing in this house?" she repeated,
with a sustained show of amazement.

"Oh, I'll get round to you, all right, all right," was
his second rejoinder.

Hobbs' left hand, in the meanwhile, had lifted my
watch from its pocket and with one quick jerk tore
watch and chain away from its waistcoat anchorage.

"You're a sweet pair, you two!" I ejaculated, for
that watch was rather a decent one and I hated to
see it ill-treated.

"Shut up!" said Hobbs, as his hand went down in
my breast-pocket in search of a wallet I knew, with
that gun-barrel pressed close against my body, that it
would be nothing short of suicidal to try to have it out
with him then and there. I had to submit to that
odious pawing and prodding about my body. But
if my turn ever came, I told myself, it would be a sorry

no THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

day for Hobbs — and an equally sorry one for that
smooth-tongued confederate of his.

"You're a sweet pair !" I repeated, hot to the bone,
as that insolent hand went down into still another
pocket.

But it did not stay there. I saw a sudden change
creep over the man's face. He looked up with a
quick and bird-like side-movement of the head. It
was not until he wheeled about that I realized the rea-
son of the movement.

The actual motive behind the thing I could not
fathom. The real significance of the tableau was be-
yond my reach. But as I looked up I saw that the
woman had crept noiselessly to the hall door, and with
a sudden movement had thrust out her hand and tried
to open this door. But as I had already locked it, and
still carried the key in my pocket, her effort was a
useless one. Just why it should enrage her confederate
was more than I could understand. He ignored me for
the time being, crossing the room at a run and flinging
the woman in black away from the door-knob. She,
in turn, was making a pretense to resent that assault.
Why she should do this I did not wait to ask. I saw
my chance and took it.

Half-a-dozen quick steps brought me to the bath-
room door, one turn of the knob threw it open, and
another step put me through it and brought the door
closed after me. There was, I found, a key in the
lock. Another second of time saw that key turned.
A quick pad or two about the cool marble wall brought
my hand in contact with the light-switch.

THE OPEN DOOR m

The moment the light came on I darted to the
inner door and tried it. But this, to my dismay, was
locked, although I could catch sight of no key in it.
I ran back for the key of the first door, tried it, and
found it useless. At any moment, I knew, a shot might
come splintering through those thin panels. And at
any moment, should they decide on that move, the
two of them, might have their own door into the hall-
way forced open and be scampering for the street.

I reached over and wrenched a nickeled towel-bar
away from the wall opposite me. One end of this
I deliberately jabbed into the white-leaded wood be-
tween the frame and the jam of the second door. I
was about to pry with all my force, when the sound
of yet another voice came from the room before me.
It was a disturbed yet sleepy voice, muffled, apparently,
by a second portiere hung on the outside of the second
door.

"Is that you, Simmonds?" demanded this voice.

I continued to pry, for I felt like a rat in a corner,
in that bald little bathroom, and I wanted space
about me, even though that meant fresh danger. The
mysteries were now more than I could decipher. I
no longer gave thought to them. The first thing I
wanted was liberation, escape. But my rod-end bent
under the pressure to which I subjected it, and I had
to reverse it and try for a fresh hold.

I could hear, as I did so, the sudden sound of feet
crossing a floor, the click of a light-switch, and then
the rattle of the portiere-rings on the rod above the
door at which I stood.

ii2 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Who locked this door?" demanded the startled
voice on the other side. For answer, I threw my
weight on the rod and forced the lock. I still kept
the metal rod in my hand, for a possible weapon, as
I half -stumbled out into the larger room.

Before me I saw a man in pajamas. He was blond
and big and his hair was rumpled — that was all I
knew about him, beyond the fact that his pajamas
were a rather foolish tint of baby-blue. We stood
there, for a second or two, staring at each other.
We were each plainly afraid of the other, just as we
were each a little reassured, I imagine, at the sight
of the other.

"For the love of God," he gasped, wide-eyed, "who
are you?"

"Quick," I cried, "is this your house?"

"Of course it's my house," he cried back, retreat-
ing as I advanced. He suddenly side-stepped and
planted his thumb on a call-bell.

"Good!" I said. "Get your servants here quick.
We'll need them!"

"Who'll need them? What's wrong? What's up?"

"I've got two burglars locked in that room."

"Burglars?"

"Yes, and they'll have a nice haul if they get away.
Have you got a revolver?"

"Yes," he answered, jerking open a drawer. I saw
that his firearm was an automatic.

"Where's the telephone?" I demanded, crossing the
room to the door that opened into the hall.

"On the floor below," he answered. He pulled on

THE OPEN DOOR 113

a brown blanket dressing-gown, drawing the girdle
tight at the waist.

''You can get to it quicker than I can," I told him.
"Give me the gun, and throw on the lights as you
go down. Then get the police here as soon as you
can."

"What'll you do?" he demanded.

"I'll guard the door," I answered as I all but pushed
him into that hallway. Then I swung-to the door
after me, and locked it from the outside. "Quick,
the gun," I said. There was no fear on his face now,
yet it was natural enough that he should hesitate.

"What are you? An officer?"

There was no time for an explanation.

"Plain-clothes man," was my glib enough answer,
as I caught the pistol from his hand. He switched
on the hall lights.

He was half-way to the top of the stairs when a
woman's scream, high pitched and horrible, echoed out
of the room where I had the two confederates trapped.
It was repeated, shrill and sharp. The face of the big
blond man went as white as chalk.

"Who is that?" he demanded, with staring eyes,
facing the locked door of the second room. Then he
backed off from the door.

I flung a cry of warning at him, but it did not stop
his charge. His great shoulder went against the
paneled wood like a battering-ram. Under the weight
of that huge body the entire frame-facing gave way;
he went lunging and staggering from sight into the
dimly-lit inner room.

ii4 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I waited there, with my gun at half-arm, feeling
the room would suddenly erupt its two prisoners.
Then, at a cry from the man, I stepped quickly in
after him.

I had fortified myself for the unexpected, but the
strangeness of the scene took my breath away. For
there I beheld the man called Hobbs engaged in the
absurd and extraordinary and altogether brutal occu-
pation of trying to beat in his confederate's head with
the butt of his heavy revolver. He must have struck
her more than once, even before the man in the hairy
brown dressing-gown and the blue pajamas could leap
for him and catch the uplifted arm as it was about to
strike again.

The woman, protected by her hat and veil and a
great mass of thick hair, still showed no signs of
collapse. But the moment she was free she sat back,
white and panting, in the same high-armed fauteuil
which I myself had occupied a half-hour before. I
made a leap for her companion's fallen revolver, before
she could get it, though I noticed that she now seemed
indifferent to both the loss of it and the outcome of
the struggle which was taking place in the center of
that pink and white abode of femininity.

And as I kept one eye on the woman and one on
the gun in my hand, I, too, caught fleeting glimpses
of that strange struggle. It seemed more like a com-
bat between wildcats than a fight between two human
beings. It took place on the floor, for neither man
was any longer on his feet, and it wavered from one
side of the room to the other, leaving a swath of

THE OPEN DOOR 115

destruction where it went. A table went over, a
fragile-limbed chair was crushed, the great cheval-
glass was shattered, the writing-desk collapsed with a
leg snapped off, a shower of toilet articles littered
the rugs, a reading-lamp was overturned and went
the way of the other things. But still the fight went
on.

I no longer thought of the woman. All my atten-
tion went to the two men struggling and panting about
the floor. The fury of the man in the shaggy and
bear-like dressing-gown was more than I could under-
stand. The madness of his onslaught seemed incom-
prehensible. This, I felt, was the way a tigress might
fight for her brood, the way a cave-man might battle
for his threatened mate. Nor did that fight end until
the big blond form towered triumphant above the
darker clad figure.

Then I looked back at the woman, startled by her
stillness through it all. She was leaning forward,
white, intent, with parted lips. In her eyes I seemed
to see uneasiness and solicitude and desolation,
but above them all slowly flowered a newer look, a
look of vague exultation as she gazed from the de-
feated man gasping and choking for breath to the
broad back of the shaggy-haired dressing-gown.

I had no chance to dwell on the puzzle of this, for
the man enveloped in the shaggy-haired garment was
calling out to me.

"Tie him up," he called. "Take the curtain-cords—
but tie him tight !"

"Do you know this man?" something in his tone

u6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

prompted me to ask, as I struggled with the heavy silk
curtain-cords.

"It's Hobbs."

"I know that, but who's Hobbs?"

"A servant dismissed a month ago," was the
other's answer.

"Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked,
looking up.

"Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated,
standing before her and staring into her white and
desolate face. It took me a moment or two to finish
my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and
sodden Hobbs. When I looked up the woman was
on her feet, several steps nearer the door.

"Watch that woman!" I cried. "She's got a load
of your loot on her!"

My words seemed merely to puzzle him. There was
no answering alarm on his face.

"What do you mean?" he inquired. He seemed
almost to resent my effort in his behalf. The woman's
stare, too, seemed able to throw him into something
approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and
helpless, as though her eye had the gift of some
hypnotic power. It angered me to think that some
mere accidental outward husk of respectability could
make things so easy for her. Her very air of false
refinement, I felt, would always render her vicious-
ness double-edged in its danger.

"Search her!" I cried. "See what she's got under
her waist there!"

He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though

THE OPEN DOOR 117

resenting my determination to dog him into an act
that was distasteful to him.

"What have you there?" he asked her, without
advancing any closer.

There was utter silence for a moment or two.

"Your letters," she at last answered, scarcely above
a whisper.

"What are they doing there?" he asked.

"I wanted them," was all she said.

"Why should you want my letters?" was his next
question.

She did not answer it, The man in the dressing-
gown turned and pointed to the inert figure of
Hobbs.

"What about him? How did he get here?"

"He must have followed me in from the street
when the door was unlocked. Or he may have come
in before I did, and kept in hiding somewhere."

"Who left the door unlocked?"

"Simmonds."

"Why?"

"Because he could trust me!"

There was a muffled barb in this retort, a barb which
I could not understand. I could see, however, that it
had its effect on the other man. He stared at the
woman with sudden altered mien, with a foolish drop
of the jaw which elongated his face and widened his
eyes at the same moment. Then he wheeled on the
sullen Hobbs.

"Hobbs, you lied about her!" he cried, like a blind
man at last facing the light.

n8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

He had his hand on the bound and helpless burglar's
throat.

"Tell me the truth, or by the living God, I'll kill you !
You lied about her?"

"About what?" temporized Hobbs.

"You know what !"

Hobbs, I noticed, was doing his best to shrink back
from the throttling fingers.

"It wasn't my fault!" he equivocated.

"But you lied?"

Hobbs did not answer, in words. But the man in
the dressing-gown knew the answer, apparently, be-
fore he let the inert figure fall away from his grasp.
He turned, in a daze, back to the waiting and watching
woman, the white- faced woman with her soul in her
eyes. His face seemed humbled, suddenly aged with
some graying blight of futile contrition.

The two staring figures appeared to sway and waver
toward each other. Before I could understand quite
what it all meant the man had raised his arms and
the woman had crept into them.

"Oh, Jim, I've been such a fool!" I heard her
wail. And I could see that she was going to cry.

I knew, too, that that midnight of blunders had left
me nothing to be proud of, that I had been an idiot
from the first — and to make that idiocy worse, I
was now an intruder.

"I'll slip down and look after that phoning," I
mumbled, so abashed and humiliated that as I groped
wearily out through the door I stumbled over the
Russian-squirrel bundle which I had placed there with

THE OPEN DOOR 119

my own hands. It was not until I reached the street
that I realized, with a gulp of relief, how yet another
night of threatening misery had been dissembled and
lost in action, very much as the pills of childhood are
dissembled in a spoonful of jelly.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT

SAT in that nocturnal sun-parlor of mine, known

to the world as Madison Square, demanding of the
quiet night why sleep should be denied me, and doing
my best to keep from thinking of Mary Lockwood. 1
sat there with my gaze fixed idly on a girl in black,
who, in turn, stared idly up at Sagittarius.

Then I lost interest in the black-clad and seemingly
cataleptic star-gazer. For I was soon busy watching
a man in a rather odd-looking velour hat. My eyes
followed him from the moment he first turned east-
ward out of Fifth Avenue. They were still on him as
he veered irresolutely southward again into the square
where I sat.

The pure aimlessness of his movements arrested my
attention. The figure that drifted listlessly in past
the Farragut Statue and wandered on under the park
trees in some way reminded me of my own. I, too,
knew only too well what it was to circle doggedly and
sullenly about like a bell-boy paging the corridors
of night for that fugitive known as Sleep.

So I continued to watch him, quietly and closely.
I had lost my interest in the white-faced girl who
sat within twenty paces of me, looking, silent and
still, up at the autumn stars.

It was the man's figure, thereafter, that challenged

1 20

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 121

my attention, for this man marked the only point of
movement in what seemed a city of the dead. It was,
I remembered, once more long past midnight, the
hour of suspended life in the emptied canyons of
the lamp-strung streets when the last taxi had hummed
the last reveler home, and the first milk-wagons had
not yet rattled up from the East River ferries.

So I sat there listlessly watching the listlessly mov-
ing figure with the wide hat-brim pulled down over its
face. There was something still youthful about the
man, for all the despondent droop to the shoulders. I
asked myself idly who or what he could be. I
wondered if, like myself, he was merely haunted by
the curse of wakefulness, if the same bloodhounds
of unrest dogged him, too, through the dark hours of
the night. I wondered if he, too, was trying to escape
from the grinding machinery of thought into some
outer passivity.

I saw him thread his indeterminate way along the
winding park walks. I saw him glance wearily up
at the massive austerity of the Metropolitan Tower,
and then turn and gaze at the faded Diana so un-
concernedly poised above her stolen Sevillian tur-
rets. I saw him look desolately about the square with
its bench-rows filled with huddled and motionless
sleepers. These sleepers, with their fallen heads and
twisted limbs, with their contorted and moveless
bodies, made the half-lit square as horrible as a bat-
tlefield. Clouded by the heavy shadows of the park
trees, they seemed like the bodies of dead men, like
broken and sodden things over which had ground

122 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

the wheels of carnage. The only murmur or sound of
life was the fountain, with its column of slowly rising
and slowly falling water, like the tired pulse-beat of
the tired city.

The man in the velour hat seemed to find some-
thing companionable in this movement, for he slowly
drew nearer. He came within three benches of where
I sat. Then he flung himself down on an empty
seat. I could see his white and haggard face as he
watched the splashing fountain. I could see his
shadowy and unhappy eyes as he pushed back his hat
and mopped his moist forehead. Then I saw him
suddenly bury his head in his hands and sit there,
minute by minute, without moving.

When he made his next movement, it was a start-
ling one. It sent a tingle of nerves scampering up
and down my backbone. For I saw his right hand
go down to his pocket, pause there a moment, and
then suddenly lift again. As it did so my eye caught
the white glimmer of metal. I could see the flash of
a revolver as he thrust it up under the hat-brim, and
held the nickeled barrel close against his temple,
just above the lean jaw-bone.

It was so sudden, so unexpected, that I must have
closed my eyes in a sort of involuntary wince. The
first coherent thought that came to me was that I
could never reach him in time. Some soberer second
thought was to the effect that even my interference
was useless, that he and his life were his own, that
a man once set on self-destruction will not be kept
from it by any outside influence.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 123

Yet even as I looked again at his huddled figure, I
heard his little gasp of something that must have been
between fear and defeat. I saw the arm slowly sink
to his side. He was looking straight before him, his
unseeing eyes wide with terror and hazy with inde-
cision.

It was then that I decided to interfere. To do so
seemed only my plain and decent duty. Yet I hesi-
tated for a moment, pondering just how to phrase
my opening speech to him.

Even as I took a sudden, deeper breath of resolu-
tion, and was on the point of crossing to his side, I
saw him fling the revolver vehemently from him.
It went glimmering and tumbling along the coppery-
green grass. It lay there, a point of high light against
the darkness of the turf.

Then I looked back to the stranger, and saw his
empty hands go up to his face. It was a quiet and
yet a tragic gesture of utter misery. Each palm was
pressed in on the corded cheek-bones, with the finger-
ends hard against the eyeballs, as though that futile
pressure could crush away all inner and all outer
vision.

Then I turned back toward the fallen revolver. As
I did so I noticed a figure in black step quietly out
and pick up the firearm. It was the white-faced girl
who had sat looking up at the stars. Before I fully
realized the meaning of her movement, she slipped the
weapon out of sight, and passed silently on down the
winding asphalt walk, between the rows of sleepers,
toward the east. There was something arresting in

i24 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

the thin young figure, something vaguely purposeful
and appealing in the poise of the half-veiled head.

1 vacillated for a moment, undecided as to which
to approach. But a second glance at the man in the
velour hat, crouched there in his utter and impassive
misery, caused me to cross over to him.

I put a hand on his flaccid shoulder, and shook it.
He did not move at first, so I shook him again. Then
he directed a slow and Resentful glance at me.

"I want to have a talk with you," I began, puzzled
as to how to proceed. He did not answer me.

"I want to help you if I can," I explained, as I still
let my hand rest on his shoulder.

"Oh, go 'way!" he ejaculated, in utter listlessness,
shaking my hand from his shoulder.

"No, I won't!" I quite firmly informed him. He
shrank back and moved away. Then he turned on
me with a resentment that was volcanic.

"For God's sake leave me alone !" he cried.

A sleeper or two on near-by benches sat up and
stared at us with their drowsily indifferent eyes.

"Then why are you making a fool of yourself like
this?" I demanded.

"That's my own business," he retorted.

"Then you intend to keep it up?" I inquired.

"No, I don't," he flung back. "/ can't."

"Then will you be so good as to talk to me?" His
sullen anger seemed strangely removed from that
exaltation which tradition imputes to last moments.
It even took an effort to be patient with him.

"No, I won't," was his prompt retort. It dampened

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 125

all the quixotic fires in my body. Then he rose to
his feet and confronted me. "And if you don't get
out of here, I'll kill you!"

His threat, in some way, struck me as funny. I
laughed out loud.

But I did not waste further time on him.

I was already thinking of the other figure, the equally
mysterious and more appealing figure in black.

I swung round and strode on through the trees just
in time to see that somber and white-faced voung
woman cross Madison Avenue, and pass westward be-
tween a granite-columned church and the towering
obelisk of a more modern god of commerce. I kept my
eyes on this street-end as it swallowed her up. Then I
passed out through the square and under the clock-
dial and into Twenty-fourth Street.

By the time I had reached Fourth Avenue I again
caught sight of the black-clad figure. It was moving
eastward on the south side of the street, as unhurried
and impassive as a sleep-walker.

When half-way to Lexington Avenue I saw the
woman stop, look slowly round, and then go slowly
up the steps of a red-brick house. She did not ring,
I could see, but let herself in with a pass-key. Once
the door had closed on her, I sauntered toward this
house. To go farther at such an hour was out of
the question. But I made a careful note of the street
number, and also of the fact that a slip of paper pasted
on the sandstone door-post announced the fact of
"Furnished Rooms."

I saw, not only that little was to be gained there,

126 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

but also that I had faced my second disappointment.
So I promptly swung back to Madison Square and the
fountain where I had left the man in the velour hat.
I ran my eye from bench to bench of sleepers, but he
was not among them. I went over the park, walk by
walk, but my search was unrewarded. Then I circled
about into Broadway, widening my radius of inspec-
tion. I shuttled back and forth along the side-streets.
I veered up and down the neighboring avenues. But
it was useless. The man in the velour hat was gone.

Then, to my surprise, as I paced the midnight
streets, a sense of physical weariness crept over me. I
realized that I had walked for miles. I had forgotten
my own troubles and that most kindly of all narcotics,
utter fatigue, crept through me like a drug.

So I went home and went to bed. And for the first
time that week I felt the Angel of Sleep stoop over
me of her own free will. For the first time that week
there was no need of the bitter lash of chloral hydrate
to beat back the bloodhounds of wakefulness. I fell
into a sound and unbroken slumber, and when I woke
up, Benson was waiting to announce that my bath
was ready.

Two hours later I was ringing the bell of a certain
old-fashioned red-brick apartment-house in East
Twenty-fourth Street. I knew little enough about
such places, but this was one obviously uninviting,
from the rusty hand-rail to the unwashed window
draperies. Equally unprepossessing was the corpulent
and dead-eyed landlady in her faded blue house-
wrapper; and equally depressing did I find the slat-

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 127

ternly and bared-armed servant who was delegated
to lead me up through the musty-smelling halls. The
third-floor front, I was informed, was the only room
in the house empty, though its rear neighbor, which
was a bargain at two dollars and a half a week, was
soon to be vacated.

I took the third-floor front, without so much as:
one searching look at its hidden beauties. The lady
of the faded blue wrapper emitted her first spark
of life as I handed over my four dollars. The list-
less eyes, I could see, were touched with regret at the
thought that she had not asked for more. I tried to
explain to her, as she exacted a deposit for my pass-
key, that I was likely to be irregular in my hours and
perhaps a bit peculiar in my habits.

These intimations, however, had no ponderable ef-
fect upon her. She first abashed me by stowing the
money away in the depths of her open corsage, and
then perplexed me by declaring that all she set out to
do, since her legs went back on Her, was to keep her
first two floors decent. Above that, apparently, de-
portment could look after itself, the upper regions
beyond her ken could be Olympian in their moral laxi-
ties.

As I stood there, smiling over this discovery, a
figure in black rustled down the narrow stairway and
edged past us in the half-lit hall.

The light fell full on her face as she opened the door
to the street. It outlined her figure, as thin as that of
a medieval saint from a missal. It was the young:
woman I had followed from Madison Square.

128 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Of this I was certain — from the moment the light
fell on her thin-cheeked face, where anxiety seemed
to have pointed the soft oval of the chin into some-
thing mask-like in its sharpness. About her, quite
beyond the fact that her eyes were the most unhappy
eyes I had ever seen, hung a muffled air of tragedy,
the air of a spirit both bewildered and baffled. But I
could see that she was, or that she had been, a rather
beautiful young woman, though still again the slender-
ness of the figure made me think of a saint from a
missal.

I was still thinking of her as I followed the sullen
and slatternly servant up the dark stairs. Once in
my new quarters, I glanced absently about at the sul-
phur-yellow wallpaper and the melancholy antiquities
that masqueraded as furniture. Then I came back to
the issue at hand.

"Who is that young woman in black who happened
to pass us in the hall ?" I casually inquired.

"Can that!" was the apathetic and quite enigmatic
retort of the bare-armed girl. I turned to inquire the
meaning of this obvious colloquialism.

"Aw, cage the zoom' bug !" said my new-found and
cynical young friend. "She ain't that kind."

"What is she?" I asked, as I slipped a bill into the
startled and somewhat incredulous hand of toil. The
transformation was immediate.

"She ain't nothin'!" was the answer. "She's just
a four-flush, an also-ran ! And unless she squares wit'
the madam by Sat'rday she's goin' to do her washin'
in somebody else's bath-tub!"

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 129

Through this sordid quartz of callousness ran one
silver streak of luck. It was plain that I was to be
on the same floor with the girl in black. And that
discovery seemed quite enough.

I waited until the maid was lost in the gloom below-
stairs and the house was quiet again. Then I calmly
and quietly stepped out into the little hall, pushed open
the door of the rear room, and slipped inside. I ex-
perienced, as I did so, a distinct and quite pleasurable
quickening of the pulse.

I found myself in a mere cell of a room, with two
dormer windows facing a disorderly vista of chimney-
pots and brick walls. On the sill of one window
stood an almost empty milk-bottle. Beside the other
window was a trunk marked with the initials "H. W."
and the pretty-nearly obliterated words "Medicine
Hat."

About the little room brooded an almost forlorn
air of neatness. On one wall was tacked a picture
postcard inscribed "In the Devil's Pool at Banff." On
another was a ranch scene, an unmounted photograph
which showed a laughing and clear-browed girl on a.
white-dappled pinto. On the chintz-covered bureau
stood a half-filled carton of soda-biscuits. Beside this",
again, lay an empty candy-box. From the mirror of
this bureau smiled down a face that was familiar to
me. It was a magazine-print of Harriet Walter, the
young Broadway star who had reached success with
the production of Broken Tics, the same Harriet
Walter who had been duly announced to marry Percy
Adams, the son of the Traction Magnate. My own

130 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

den, I remembered, held an autographed copy of the
same picture.

Beyond this, however, the room held little of inter-
est and nothing of surprise. Acting on a sudden and
a possibly foolish impulse, after one final look at the
room and its record of courageous struggles, I took a
bank-note from my waistcoat pocket, folded it, opened
the top drawer of the bureau and dropped the bill into
it. Then I stood staring down into the still open
drawer, for before me lay the revolver which the girl
had carried away the night before from Madison
Square.

In a few moments I went back to my own room and
sat down in the broken-armed rocking-chair, and tried
desperately to find some key to the mystery. But no
light came to me.

I was still puzzled over it when I heard the sound
of steps on the uncarpeted stairway. They were very
slow and faltering steps. As I stood at the half-opened
door listening, I felt sure I heard the sound of some-
thing that was half-way between a sob and a gasp.
Then came the steps again, and then the sound of
heavy breathing. I heard the rustle of paper as the
door of the back room was pushed open, and then
the quick slam of the door.

This was followed by a quiet and almost inarticulate
cry. It was not a call, and it was not a moan. But
what startled me into sudden action was the noise
that followed. It was a sort of soft-pedaled thud, as
though a body had fallen to the floor.

I no longer hesitated. It was clear that something.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 131

was wrong. I ran to the closed door, knocked on it,
and a moment later swung it open.

As I stepped into the room I could see the girl lying
there, her upturned face as white as chalk, with bluish-
gray shadows about the closed eyes. Beside her on
the floor lay a newspaper, a flaring head-lined after-
noon edition.

I stood staring stupidly down at the white face for a
moment or two before it came to me that the girl had
merely fallen in a faint. Then, seeing the slow beat
of a pulse in the thin throat, I dropped on one knee
and tore open the neck of her blouse. Then I got
water from the stoneware jug on the wash-stand and
sprinkled the placid and colorless brow. I could see,
as I lifted her up on the narrow white bed, how blood-
less and ill-nurtured her body was. The girl was half
starved ; of that there was no shadow of doubt.

She came to very slowly. As I leaned over her,
waiting for the heavy-lidded eyes to open, I let my
glance wander back to the newspaper on the floor. I
there read that Harriet Walter, the young star of the
Broken Ties Company, had met with a serious acci-
dent. It had occurred while riding down Morningside
Avenue in a touring-car driven by Percy Alward
Adams, the son of the well-known Traction Mag-
nate. The brake had apparently refused to work on
Cathedral Hill, and the car had collided with a pillar
of the Elevated Railway at the corner of One-hundred-
and-ninth Street. Adams himself had escaped with a
somewhat lacerated arm, but Miss Walter's injuries
were more serious. She had been taken at once to St.

1 32 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Luke's Hospital, but a few blocks away. She had not,
however, regained consciousness, and practically all
hope of recovery had been abandoned by the doctors.

I was f renziedly wondering what tie could bind these
two strangely diverse young women together when
the girl beside me gave signs of returning life. I was
still sousing a ridiculous amount of water on her face
and neck when her eyes suddenly opened. They looked
up at me, dazed and wide with wonder.

"What is it?" she asked, gazing about the room.
Then she looked back at me again.

"I think you must have fallen," I tried to explain.
"But it's all right; you mustn't worry."

My feeble effort at reassuring her was not effective.
I could see the perplexed movement of her hands, the
unuttered inquiry still in her eyes. She lay there, star-
ing at me for a long time.

"You see, I'm your new neighbor," I told her, "and
I heard you from my room."

She did not speak. But I saw her lips pucker into
a little sob that shook her whole body. There seemed
something indescribably childlike in the movement. It
took a fight to keep up my air of bland optimism.

"And now," I declared, "I'm going to slip out for a
minute and get you a little wine."

She made one small hand-gesture of protest, but I
ignored it. I dodged in for my hat, descended the
stairs to the street, got Benson on the wire; and in-
structed him to send the motor-hamper and two bot-
tles of Burgundy to me at once. Then I called up St.
Luke's Hospital. There, strangely enough, I was re-

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 133

fused all information as to Harriet Walter's condition.
It was not even admitted, in fact, that she was at
present a patient at that institution.

The girl, when I got back, was sitting in a rocking-
chair by the window. She seemed neither relieved nor
disturbed by my return. Her eyes were fixed on the
blank wall opposite her. Her colorless face showed
only too plainly that this shock from which she had
suffered had left her indifferent to all other currents of
life, as though every further stroke of fate had been
rendered insignificant. She did not even turn her eyes
when I carried the hamper into the room and opened
it. She did not look up as I poured the wine and held
a glass of it for her to drink.

She sipped at it absently, brokenly, reminding me of
a bird drinking from a saucer-edge. But I made her
take more of it. I persisted, until I could see a faint
and shell-like tinge of color creep into her cheeks.

Then she looked at me, for the first time, with com-
prehending and strangely grateful eyes. She made a
move, as though to speak. But as she did so I could
see the quick gush of tears that came to her eyes and
her gesture of hopelessness as she looked down at the
newspaper on the floor.

"Oh, I want to die !" she cried brokenly and weakly.
"I want to die !"

Her words both startled and perplexed me. Here,
within a few hours' time, I was encountering the second
young person who seemed tired of life, who was ready
and willing to end it.

"What has happened?" I asked, as I held more of

i34 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

the Burgundy out for her to drink. Then I picked up
the afternoon paper with the flaring head-lines.

She pointed with an unsteady finger to the paper in
my hands.

"Do you know her?" she asked.

"Yes, I happen to know her," I admitted.

"Have you known her long?" asked the girl.

"Only a couple of years," I answered. "Since she
first went with Frohman."

The possible truth flashed over me. They were sis-
ters. That was the strange tie that bound them to-
gether ; one the open and flashing and opulent, and the
other the broken and hidden and hopeless.

"Do you know Harriet Walter?" I asked.

She laughed a little, forlornly, bitterly. The wine, I
imagined, had rather gone to her head.

"I am Harriet Walter !" was her somewhat startling
declaration.

She was still shaken and ill, I could see. I took the
Burgundy glass from her hand. I wanted her mind
to remain lucid. There was a great deal for me still
to fathom.

"And they say she's going to die?" she half declared,
half inquired, as her eyes searched my face.

"But what will it mean to you?" I demanded.

She seemed not to have heard; so I repeated the
question.

"It means the end," she sobbed, "the end of every-
thing!"

"But why?" I insisted.

She covered her face with her hands.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 135

"Oh, I can't tell you!" she moaned. "I can't
explain."

"But there must be some good and definite reason
why this young woman's death should end everything
for you."

The girl looked about her, like a life-prisoner facing
the four blank walls of a cell. Her face was without
hope. Nothing but utter misery, utter despair, was
written on it.

Then she spoke, not directly to me, but more as
though she were speaking to herself.

"When she dies, I die too!"

I demanded to know what this meant. I tried to
burrow down to the root of the mystery. But my
efforts were useless. I could wring nothing more out
of the unhappy and tragic-eyed girl. And the one
thing she preferred just then, I realized, was solitude.
So I withdrew.

The entire situation, however, proved rather too
much for me. The more I thought it over the more
it began to get on my nerves. So I determined on a
prompt right-about-face. I decided to begin at the
other end of the line.

My first move was to phone for the car. Latreille
came promptly enough, but with a look of sophisti-
cation about his cynical mouth which I couldn't help
resenting.

"St. Luke's Hospital," I told him as I stepped into
the car.

At that institution, however, I was again refused
all information as to the condition of Harriet Walter.'

136 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

It was not even admitted, when I became more in-
sistent, that any such person was in the hospital.

"But I'm a friend of this young lady's," I tried to
explain. "And I've a right to know of her condition."

The calm-eyed official looked at me quite unmoved.

"This young lady seems to have very many friends.
And some of them seem to be very peculiar."

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded. For
answer he pointed to a figure pacing up and down in
the open street.

"There's another of these friends who've been in-
sisting on seeing her," he explained, with a shrug of
extenuation.

The uniformed attendant of that carbolized and
white-walled temple of pain must have seen my start
as I glanced out at the slowly pacing figure. For it
was that of a young man wearing a velour hat. It
was the youth I had met the night before in Madison
Square.

"Do you happen to know that man's name?" I asked.

"He gave it as Mallory — James Mallory," was the
answer.

I wasted no more time inside those depressing walls.
I was glad to get out to the street, to the open air
and the clear afternoon sunlight. I had already de-
cided on my next step.

Whether the man in the velour hat recognized me
or not, I could not say. If he did, he gave no sign of
it. Yet I could see that he resented my addressing
him, although he showed no surprise as I did so by
name. It was not until I point-blank asked if he had

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 137

been inquiring about Harriet Walter that any trace
of interest came into his face.

He replied, with considerable ferocity, that he had.
One glimpse of the unsteady fingers and twitching
eyelids showed me the tension under which he was
struggling. I felt genuinely sorry for him.

"I happen to know Miss Walter," I told him, "and if
you'll be so good as to step in my car, I can tell you
anything you may want to know."

''Is your name Adams ?" the white- faced youth sud-
denly demanded.

"It is not," I answered, with considerable alacrity,
for his face was not pleasant to look at.

"Then why can you tell me what I want to know ?"
he asked, still eying me with open hostility. I strug-
gled to keep my temper. It was a case where one could
afford to be indulgent.

"If we each have a friend in this lady, it's not un-
reasonable that we should be able to be friends our-
selves," I told him. "So let's clear the cobwebs by
a spin down-town."

"Gasoline won't wash my particular cobwebs away,"
he retorted. There was something likable about his
audacious young face, even under its cloud of bitter-
ness.

"Then why couldn't you dine with me, at a very
quiet club of mine?" I suggested. "Or, better still,
on the veranda of the Clairemont, where we can talk
together."

He hesitated at first, but under my pressure he
yielded, and we both got in the car and swung west-

138 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

ward, and then up Riverside to the Clairemont. There
I secured a corner piazza-table, overlooking the river.
And there I exerted a skill of which I had once been
proud, in ordering a dinner which I thought might
appeal to the poignantly unhappy young man who sat
across the table from me. I could see that he was still
looking at me, every now and then, with both revolt
and sullen bewilderment written on his lean young
face. It would be no easy matter, I knew, to win his
confidence.

"I suppose you think I'm crazy, like the rest of
them?" he suddenly demanded. I noticed that he had
already taken his third drink of wine.

''Why should I think that?"

"I've had enough to make me crazy!" he ejaculated,
with that abject self-pity which marks the last mile-
stone on the avenue of hope.

"Perhaps I could help you," I suggested. "Or per-
haps I could advise you."

"What good's advice when you're up against what
I'm up against?" was his embittered retort.

He was apparently finding relief in the Pommery.
I found a compensating relief in merely beholding
that look of haunted and abject misery going out of his
young eyes.

"Then tell me what the trouble is," I said.

He still shook his head. Then he suddenly looked
up.

"How long have you known Harriet Walter?" he
asked.

"From the time," I told him, after a moment's

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 139

thought, "when she first appeared for the Fresh Air
Fund at the Plaza. That was about two years ago —
when she first went with Frohman."

"I've known her for twenty years !" was the youth's
unexpected exclamation. "We grew up together, out
West."

"Where out West ?" I asked.

"In Medicine Hat — that's a Canadian prairie town."

"But she's younger than you?"

"Only two years. She's twenty-two; I'm twenty-
four. She changed her name from Wilson to Walter
when she went on the stage."

"Then you are close friends?" I asked, for I could
see the wine had loosened his reticent young tongue.

"Friends !" he scoffed. "I'm the man she promised
to marry!"

Here, I told myself, was a pretty kettle of fish. I
knew the man before me was not Adams. Yet it was
several weeks now since Harriet Walter's engagement
to young Adams had been officially announced. And
there was nothing unstable or predaceous about the
Harriet Walter I had known.

"Would you mind telling me just when she promised
to marry you?" I asked. "Remember, this is not pry-
ing. I'm only trying to get behind that cobweb."

"She promised me over two years ago," he answered
me, quite openly.

"Definitely?" I insisted.

"As definite as pen and ink could make it. Even be-
fore' she gave in, before she gave the promise, we'd
had a sort of understanding. That was before I made

140 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

my British Columbia strike out West. She'd come
East to study for the stage. She always felt she
would make a great actress. We all tried to keep her
from it, but she said it was her career. She'd been
having a hard time of it then, those first six months.
So I came through to New York and wanted to take
her back, to get her out of all that sort of thing. But
she put me off. She wouldn't give in to being defeated
in her work. She gave me her promise, but asked for
a year's time. When that was up, she'd made her
hit. Then, of course, she asked for one year more.
And in the meantime I made my own hit — in timber
limits."

"But hasn't she justified the time you've given her?"
I inquired, remembering the sudden fame that had
come to her, the name in electrics over the Broadway
theater, the lithographs in the shop windows, the inter-
views in the Sunday papers.

"Justified !" cried the young man across the table
from me. "After I'd waited two years, after she'd
given me her promise, she's turned round and prom-
ised to marry this man Adams!"

"And has she never explained?"

"Explained? She won't see me. She had me put
out of her hotel. She went off to Narragansett. She
pretended she doesn't even know me."

This sounded very unlike the Harriet Walter I
had known. There had seemed little that was deliber-
ately venal or treacherous in that artless-eyed young
lady's nature.

"And what did you do?" I asked.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 141

"What could I do ? I waited and tried again. I felt
that if I could only see her face to face she'd be able
to explain, to make the whole thing seem less like
insanity."

"And she wouldn't even see you, meet you?"
"Not once. Something's set her against me; some-
thing's changed her. She never used to be that sort —
never!"

"And you insist all this is without rhyme or reason?"
"Without one jot of reason. That's what made it
so hopeless. And last night when I heard of this acci-
dent I put my pride in my pocket, and tried still again.
It was the same thing over again. They seemed to take
me for a crank, or paranceic of some kind, up there
at the hospital. And then I gave up. I felt I'd about
reached the end of my rope. I thought it all over,
quite calmly, and decided to end everything. I walked '
the streets half the night, then I sat down and decided
to blow my brains out. But I couldn't do it. I was
too much of a coward. I hadn't the courage."

"That would have been very foolish," was my in-
adequate reply, for at a bound my thoughts went back
to the night before and the scene in the square.

"Well, what would you have done ?" was the prompt
and bitter challenge of the unhappy youth facing me.

I thought for a moment before attempting to ,
answer him.

"Why," I temporized, "I'd have tried to get down
to the root of the mystery. I'd have made some effort
to find out the reason for it; for everything seems to
have 1 a reason, you know."

142 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Again I heard him emit his listless little scoff of
misery.

"There's no reason," he declared.

"There must be," I maintained.

"Then show me where or what it is," he challenged.

"I will," I said, with sudden conviction. "There's a
reason for all this, and I'm going to find it out!"

He studied my face with his tired and unhappy
young eyes as I sat there trying to fit the edges of the
two broken stories together. It was not easy: it was
like trying to piece together a shattered vase of cloi-
sonne-work.

"And how will you find it out?" he was listlessly
inquiring.

Instead of answering him, I looked up, fixed my eyes
on him and asked another question.

"Tell me this : if there is a reason, do you still care
for her?"

He resented the question, as I was afraid he would.

"What concern is that of yours?"

"If all this thing's a mistake, it's going to be some
concern of yours," I told him.

He sat there in dead silence for a minute or two.

"I've always cared for her," he said, and I knew
what his answer was going to be before he spoke.
"But it's no use. It's all over. It's over and done
with. There's not even a mistake about it."

"There must be. And I'm going to find out where
and what it is."

"And how are you going to find that out?" he
reiterated.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 143

"Come along with me," I cried a little presumptuous-
ly, a little excitedly, "and by ten o'clock to-night I'll
have your reason for you !"

My flash-in-the-pan enthusiasm was shorter lived
than I had expected. The tingling and wine-like
warmth soon disappeared. A reaction set in, once
we were out in the cool night air. And in that reac-
tion I began to see difficulties, to marshal doubts
and misgivings.

The suspicion crept over me that, after all, I might
have been talking to a man with a slightly unbalanced
mind. Delusions, such as his, I knew, were not un-
common. There were plenty of amiable cranks who
carried about some fixed conviction of their one-time
intimate association with the great, the settled belief
that they are the oppressed and unrecognized friends
of earth's elect.

Yet this did not altogether fill the bill; it could
not explain away everything. There was still the
mystery of the girl in the Twenty-fourth Street room-
ing-house. There was still the enigma of two per-
sons claiming to be Harriet Walter.

On my way down to that rooming-house an idea
occurred to me. It prompted me to step in at my
club for a minute or two, leaving Mallory in the car.
Then I dodged back to the reading-room, took down
from its shelf a Who's Who on the Stage, and
turned up the name of Harriet Walter.

There, to my discomfiture, I read that Harriet
Walter's family name was recorded as "Kellock," and
instead of being a Canadian, and born and brought up

144 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

in the western town of Medicine Hat, as young Mal-
lory had claimed, her birthplace was recorded as Lan-
sing, Michigan. She had been educated at the Gilder
Seminary in Boston, and had later studied one year
at the Wheatley Dramatic School in New York. From
there she had gone on the stage, taking small parts,
but soon convincing her management that she was ca-
pable of better things. In little over a year she had
been made a star in the Broken Ties production.

The St. Luke's officials, after all, had not been so
far wrong. The young man in the velour hat was
clearly off his trolley.

It was, however, too late to turn back. And there
was still the other end of the mystery to unravel. So
I ushered young Mallory up the musty stairs to my
third-floor room, and seated him with a cigar and a
magazine between those four bald and depressing walls
with their sulphur-colored paper. Then I stepped out-
side, and carefully closed the door after me. Then I
crossed the hall to the girl's room and knocked.

There was no answer, so I opened the door and
looked in. The room was empty. A sense of frus-
tration, of defeat, of helplessness, swept through me.
This was followed by a feeling of alarm, an impres-
sion that I might, after all, be too late.

I crossed the room with a sudden premonition of
evil. Then I turned on the light and pulled open
the top drawer of the chintz-covered bureau. There
lay my bank-note. And beside it, I noticed, with a
sense of relief, still lay the revolver.

I took the weapon up and looked it over, hesitat-

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 145

ing whether or not to unload it. I still held it in my
hand, staring down at it, when I heard the creak of
the door behind me. It was followed by a sudden
and quite audible gasp of fright.

It was the owner of the room herself, I saw, the
moment I swung around. It was not so much terror
in her eyes, by this time, as sheer surprise.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, with a
quaver of bewilderment.

"I'll answer that when you answer a question of
mine," I temporized, as I held the revolver up before
her. "Where did you get this ?"

She did not speak for a second or two.

"Why are you spying on me like this?" she sud-
denly demanded. She sank into a chair, pulling ner-
vously at her pair of worn gloves.

"You insist on knowing?" I asked.

"I've a right to know."

"Because you are not Harriet Walter," was the
answer I sent bullet-like at her.

She raised her eyes to mine. There was neither
anger nor resentment on her face. All I could see
was utter weariness, utter tragedy.

"I know," she said. She spoke very quietly. Some-
thing in her voice sent a stab of pity through me.

"I'm only trying to help you," I told her. "I only
want to clear up this maddening muddle."

"You can't," she said very simply. "It's too late."

"It's not too late!" I blindly persisted.

"What do you know about it ?" was her listless and
weary retort.

146 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"I know more about it than you imagine," was my
answer. "I know where this revolver came from, just
when and where you picked it up, and just how near
you came to using it."

She covered her face with her hands. Then she
dropped them to her side, with a gesture of hopeless-
ness.

"Oh, they'll all know now !" she moaned. "I knew
it would come, some day. And I haven't the strength
to face it — I haven't the strength!"

I felt, in some way, that the moment was a climactic
one.

"But how did it begin?" I asked more gently, as
I gazed down at the fragile and girlish body huddled
together in the chair.

"It began two years ago," she went on in her tired
and throaty monotone. "It began when I saw I was
a failure, when I realized that all was useless, that I'd
made a mistake."

"What mistake?" I demanded, still in the dark.

"The mistake I wasn't brave enough to face. I
thought it was the life I was made for, that they'd
never understood at home. Even he couldn't under-
stand, I thought. Then they let me come. I worked,
oh, so hard! And when I left the school all I could
get was a place in the chorus. I was ashamed to tell
them. I pretended I had a part, a real part. He kept
arguing that I ought to give it up. He kept asking me
to come back. I wasn't brave enough to acknowledge
defeat. I still thought my chance would come ; I kept
asking for more time."

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 147

"And then?" I prompted.

"Then I couldn't even stay at the work I had. It
became impossible; I can't tell you why. Then I did
anything, from extra work with moving pictures to
reader in the City Library classes. But I still kept
going to the agencies, to the Broadway offices, trying
to get a part. And things dragged on and on. And
then I did this, this awful thing."

"What awful thing?" I asked, trying to bridge the
ever-recurring breaks in her thought. But she ignored
the interruption.

"We'd studied together in the same classes at the
Wheatley School. And people had said we looked
alike. But she was born for that sort of life, for
success. As I went down, step by step, she went up.
He wrote me that I must be getting famous, for he'd
seen my picture on a magazine-cover. It was hers. I
pretended it was mine. I pretended I was doing the
things she was doing. I let them believe I'd taken a
new name, a stage name. I sent them papers that told
of her success. I became a cheat, an impostor, a liv-
ing lie — I became Harriet Walter!"

At last the light had come. I saw everything in a
flash. I suddenly realized the perplexities and pro-
fundities of human life. I felt shaken by a sudden
pity for these two bound and unhappy spirits, at that
moment so close together, yet groping so foolishly and
perversely along their mole-like trails.

I was still thinking of the irony of it all, of the two
broken and lonely young lives even at that moment
under the same roof, crushed under the weight of

1 48 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

their unseeing and uncomprehending misery, when the
girl in the chair began to speak again.

"It was terrible/' she went on, in her passionate
resolve to purge her soul of the whole corroding blight.
"I didn't dream what it would lead to, what it would
cause. I dreaded every advance she made. It wasn't
jealousy, it was more than that; it was fear, terror.
She seemed to be feeding on me, day by day, month
by month. I knew all the time that the higher she got
the lower I had to sink. And now, in a different way,
she's taken everything from me. Taken everything,
without knowing it !"

"No, you're wrong there," I said. "She hasn't
taken everything."

"What is there left?" was her forlorn query.

"Life — all your real life. This has been a sort of
nightmare, but now it's over. Now you can go back
and begin over again."

"It's too late!" She clasped her thin hands hope-
lessly together. "And there's no one to go to."

"There's Mallory" I said, waiting for some start
as the name fell on her ears. But I saw none.

"No," she cried, "he'd hate and despise me."

"But you still care for him?" I demanded.

"I need him," she sobbingly acknowledged. "Yes —
yes, I always cared for him. But he'd never under-
stand. He'd never forgive me. He's grown away
from me."

"He's waiting for you," I said.

I stood looking at the bowed figure for a moment.
Then I slipped out of the room.

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT 149

I stepped in through my own door and closed it
after me. Young Mallory, with his watch in his hand,
swung about from the window and faced me.

"Well, it's ten o'clock — and nothing's settled!"

"It is settled," was my answer.

I led him across the quiet hall to the half-lit back
room.

I saw his startled and groping motion. Then I
heard his cry of "Harrie!" and her answering cry of
"Jamie" as the white face, with its hunger and its
happiness, looked up into his.

Then I quietly stepped outside and closed the door,
leaving them alone. From that moment I was an out-
sider, an intruder. My part was over and done. But
the sight of those two young people, in each other's
arms, made my thoughts turn back to Mary Lockwood
and the happiness which had been lost out of my own
life. And I didn't sleep so well that night as I had
hoped to.

CHAPTER VI

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER

(6 jk RE you waiting for some one, sir?"

■^ *■ That question, for all its veneer of respect-
fulness, was only too patently a message of dismissal.
And I resented it, not only because it was an imperti-
nence, but more because it had driven out of my
drowsy brain a very beautiful picture of Mary Lock-
wood as she- stooped over an old Italian table-cover
embroidered with gold galloon.

"Are you waiting for some one?" repeated that
newly arrived all-night waiter, in no way impressed
by my silence.

"I am," I announced as I inspected him with open
disapproval. I was dreamily wondering why, in the
name of common sense, waiters always dressed in such
ridiculous and undecorative neckties.

This particular waiter, however, continued to re-
gard me out of a fishy and cynical eye. Then he
looked at the clock. Then he looked at my empty
wine-cooler, plainly an advertisement of suspended
circulation in the only fluid that seemed vital to him.

"Was it a lady?" he had the effrontery to inquire.

I could see his eyes roam about the all but empty
room. It was the low-ebb hour when a trolley car is
an event along the empty street, the hour when chairs
are piled on cafe tables, the white corpuscles of the

150

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 151

milk wagons begin to move through the city's sleepy-
arteries, and those steel nerves known as telegraph
wires keep languidly awake with the sugary thrills of
their night letters.

"Yes, it was a lady," I answered. That wall-eyed
intruder knew nothing of the heavenly supper I had
stumbled on in that wicked French restaurant, or of
the fine and firm Clos Vougeot that had been unearthed
from its shabby cellar, or of my own peace of mind as
I sat there studying the empty metal cooler and pon-
dering how the mean and scabby wastes of Champagne
could mother an ichor so rich with singing etherealities.

"Er — just what might she look like, sir?" my tor-
mentor next asked of me, blinking about in a loose
and largely condoning matter-of-factness as though in
placid search of some plumed and impatient demirep
awaiting her chance to cross the bar of acquaintance-
ship on the careless high tide of inebriacy.

"She moves very, very quietly, and has a star in her
hair," I replied to that fish-eyed waiter. "Her breath
is soft and dewy, and her brow is hooded. And in
her hands she carries a spray of poppies."

The waiter looked down at me with that impersonal
mild pity with which it is man's wont to view the
harmlessly insane.

"Surely," I said with a smothered yawn, "surely
you have met her? Surely you have been conscious
of those soft and shadowy eyes gazing into yours as
you melted into her arms?"

"Quite so, sir," uneasily admitted my wall-eyed
friend. Then I began to realize that he was waking

1 52 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

me up. I grew fearful lest his devastating invasion
should frighten away the timorous spirit I had been
wooing as assiduously as an angler seeking his first
trout. For one long hour, with a full body and an
empty head, I had sat there stalking sleep as artfully
and as arduously as huntsman ever stalked a deer. And
I knew that if I moved from that spot the chase would
be over, for that night at least.

"But the odd thing about her," I languidly explained,
"is that she evades only those who seek her. She is
coy. She denies herself to those who most passionately
demand her. Yet something tells me that she is hover-
ing near me at this moment, that she is about to bend
over me with those ineffable eyes if only I await the
golden moment. And so, my dear sir, if you will take
this as a slight reward for your trouble, and cover
that exceedingly soiled-looking divan in that exceed-
ingly disreputable-looking alcove with a clean table-
cloth, and then draw that curtain which is apparently
designed to convert it into a chambre particiiliere, you
will be giving me a chance to consort with an angel of
graciousness more lovely than any meretricious head
that ever soiled its faded plush. And if I am left un-
interrupted until you go off in the morning, your re-
ward will then be doubled."

His puzzled face showed, as he peered down at the
bill in his hand, that if this indeed were madness, there
was a not repugnant sort of method in it.

So he set about in a half dazed fashion draping that
none too clean divan with a table-cloth, making it, in
fact, look uncomfortably like a bier. Then he carried

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 153

my hat and gloves and overcoat to a chair at the foot
of the divan. Then he took me by the arm, firmly and
solicitously.

His face, as I made my way without one stagger or
reel into that shabby little quietude screened off from
the rest of the world, was a study in astonishment. It
was plain that I puzzled him. He even indulged in a
second wondering glance back at the divan as he drew
the portieres. Then, if I mistake not, he uttered the
one explanatory and self-sufficient word — "Needle-
pumper."

I heard him tiptoe in, a few minutes later, and de-
cently cover my legs with the overcoat from the chair.
I did not speak, for bending over me was a rarer and
sweeter Presence, and I wanted no sound or movement
to frighten her away. Just when her hand touched
mine I can not tell. But I fell off into a deep and
natural sleep and dreamed I was being carried through
Sicilian orange groves by a wall-eyed waiter with
wings like a butterfly.

Then the scene changed, as scenes have the habit of
doing in dreams. I seemed to be the center of a sub-
cellar conference of highwaymen, presided over by La-
treille himself. Then the voices shifted and changed,
receded and advanced. I seemed to be threading that
buffer-state which lies between the two kingdoms of
Sleep and Wakefulness, the buffer-state that has no
clear-cut outlines and twists like a weevil between ever-
shifting boundaries.

"Where's Sir 'Enery," said a voice from a moun-
tain-top. Then an answering murmur of voices buzzed

154 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

about me like bees, only an intelligible word or two
seeming to reinforce the fabric of my imaginings as
iron rods reinforce concrete- walls. And I continued to
lie there in that pleasant borderland torpor, which is
neither wakefulness nor slumber. I seemed to doze on,
in no ponderable way disturbed by the broken hum of
talk that flickered and wavered through my brain.

"Then why can't Sir Hem*}' work on the Belmont
job?" one of the voices was asking.

"I told you before, Sir Henry's tied up," another
voice answered.

"What doing?" asked the first voice.

"He's fixing his plant for the Van Tuyl coup," was
the answer.

"What Van Tuyl?"

"Up in Seventy-third Street. He's got 'em hog
tied."

"And what's more," broke in a third voice, "he
won't touch a soup case since he got that safe-wedge
in the wrist. It kind o' broke his nerve for the nitro
work."

"Aw, you couldn't break that guy's nerve!"

"Well, he knows he's marked, anyway."

Then came a lull, followed by the scratch of a match
and the mumbling of voices again.

"How'd he get through the ropes up there?" in-
quired one of these voices.

"Same old way. Butler ing. Turk McMeekin doped
him up a half-dozen London recommends. That got
him started out in Morristown, with the Whippeny
Club. Then he did the Her res ford job. But he's got

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 155

a peach with this Van Tuyl gang. They let him lock
up every night — silver and all — and carry the keys to
bed with him!"

"It's up to Sir 'Enery to make 'em dream he's the
real thing," murmured another of the voices.

"Sure!" answered still another voice that seemed a
great distance away.

Then the mumble became a murmur and the mur-
mur a drone. And the drone became a sighing of
birch tops, and I was stalking Big-Horn across moun-
tain peaks of cafe par fait, where a pompous English
butler served peches Melba on the edge of every sec-
ond precipice.

When I woke up it was broad daylight, and my
wall-eyed waiter was there waiting for his second bill.
And I remembered that I ought to phone Benson so
he could have the coffee ready by the time I walked
home through the mellow November air.

It was two hours later that the first memory of
those murmuring midnight voices came back to me.
The words I had overheard seemed to have been buried
in my mind like seeds in the ground. Then here and
there a green shoot of suspicion emerged. The more
I thought it over, the more disturbed I became. Yet
I warned myself that I could be sure of nothing. The
one tangibility was the repeated word, "Van Tuyl."
And there at least was something on which I could
focus my attention.

I went to the telephone and called up Beatrice Van
Tuyl. Years before we had played water polo and
catboated on the Sound together. I realized, as I

156 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

heard that young matron's cheery voice over the tele-
phone wire, that I would have to pick my steps with
care.

"I say, Beatrice, are you possibly in need of a but-
ler?" I began as offhandedly as I was able.

"Out of a place, Witter dear?" was the chuckling
inquiry that came to me.

"No, I'm not, but I know of a good man," was my
mendacious reply. "And I rather thought — "

"My dear Witter," said the voice over the wire,
"we've a jewel of a man up here. He's English, you
know. And I'm beginning to suspect he's been with
royalty. Jim's always wanted to stick pins in his legs
to see if he really isn't petrified."

"What's his name?"

"Just what it ought to be — 'the most appropriate
name of Wilkins."

"How long have you had him?"

"Oh, weeks and weeks !" Only a New York house-
holder could understand the tone of triumph in that
retort.

"And you're sure of him in every way?"

"Of course we're sure of him. He's been a Gibral-
tar of dependability."

"Where did you get him from?'*

"From Morristown. He was at the Whippeny Club
out there before he came to us."

"The Whippeny Club!" I cried, for the name struck
like a bullet on the metal of memory.

"Don't you think," the voice over the wire was say-
ing, "that you'd better come up for dinner to-night and

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 157

inspect the paragon at close range? And you might
talk to us a little, between whiles."

"I'd love to," was my very prompt reply.

'Then do," said Beatrice Van Tuyl. "A little after
seven."

And a little after seven I duly rang the Van Tuyls'
door-bell and was duly admitted to that orderly and
well-appointed Seventy-third Street house, so like a
thousand other orderly and well-appointed New York
houses hidden behind their unchanging masks of brown
and gray.

Yet I could not help feeling the vulnerability of that
apparently well-guarded home. For all its walls of
stone and brick, for all the steel grills that covered its
windows and the heavy scroll work that protected its
glass door, it remained a place munificently ripe for
plunder. Its solidity, I felt, was only a mockery. It
made me think of a fortress that had been secretly
mined. Its occupants seemed basking in a false se-
curity. The very instruments which went to insure
that security were actually a menace. The very ma-
chinery of service which made possible its cloistral
tranquillity held the factor for its disruption.

As I surrendered my hat and coat and ascended to
that second floor where I had known so many sedately
happy hours, I for once found myself disquieted by
its flower-laden atmosphere. I began to be oppressed
by a new and disturbing sense of responsibility. It
would be no light matter, I began to see, to explode
a bomb of dissension in that principality of almost ar-
rogant aloofness. It would be no joke to confound

158 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

that smoothly flowing routine with which urban wealth
so jealously surrounds itself.

I suddenly remembered there was nothing- in which
I could be positive, nothing on which I could with cer-
tainty rely. And my inward disquiet was increased, if
anything, by the calm and blithely contented glance
Beatrice Van Tuyl leveled at me.

"And what's all this mystery about our man Wil-
kins ?" she asked me, with the immediacy of her sex.

"Won't you let me answer that question a little later
in the evening?"

"But, my dear Witter, that's hardly fair!" she pro-
tested, as she held a lighted match for her husband's
cigarette. "Do you know, I actually believe you've
spotted some one you want to supplant Wilkins with."

"Please—"

"Or did he spill soup on you some time when we
didn't see it?"

"I imagine he's spilt a bit of soup in his day," I an-
swered, remembering what I had overheard as to the
safe wedge. And as I spoke I realized that my one
hope lay in the possibility of getting a glimpse of the
mark which that wedge had left — if, indeed, my whole
sand-chain of coincidences did not split back into the
inconsequentialities of dreamland.

"You can't shake my faith in Wilkins," said the
blue-eyed woman in the blue silk dinner gown, as she
leaned back in a protecting-armed and softly padded
library-chair which suddenly became symbolic of her
whole guarded and upholstered life. "Jim, tell Witter
what a jewel Wilkins really is."

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 159

Jim, whose thought was heavy ordnance beside his
wife's flying- column of humor, turned the matter
solemnly over in his mind.

"He's a remarkably good man," admitted the stolid
and leviticarjim, "remarkably good."

"And you've seen him yourself, time and time
again," concurred his wife.

"But I've never been particularly interested in ser-
vants, you know," was my self-defensive retort.

"Then why, in the face of the Immortal Ironies, are
you putting my butler under the microscope ?" was the
return shot that came from the flying column. The
acidulated sweetness of that attack even nettled me
into a right-about-face.

"Look here," I suddenly demanded, "have either of
you missed anything valuable about here lately?"

The two gazed at each other for a moment in per-
plexed wonder.

"Of course not," retorted the woman in the dinner
gown. '"Not a thing !"

"And you know you have everything intact, all your
jewelry, your plate, your pocketbooks, the trinkets a
sneakthief might call it worth while to round up?"

"Of course we have. And I can't even resent your
bracketing my pocketbook in with the trinkets."

"But are you certain of this? Could you verify it
at a moment's notice?"

"My dear Witter, we wouldn't need to. I mean
we're doing it every day of our lives. It's instinctive ;
it's as much a habit as keeping moths out of the closets
and cobwebs out of the corners."

i6o THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"What's making you ask all this?" demanded the
heavy artillery.

"Yes, what's suddenly making you into a Holmes's
watchman?" echoed the flying brigade.

Still again I saw that it was going to be no easy
thing to intimate to persons you cared for the possi-
bility of their sleeping on a volcano. Such an intima-
tion has both its dangers and its responsibilities. My
earlier sense of delight in a knowledge unparticipated
in by others was gradually merging into a conscious-
ness of a disagreeable task that would prove unsavory
in both its features and its finale.

"I'm asking all this," I replied, "because I have good
reason to believe this paragon you call Wilkins is not
only a criminal, but has come into this house for
criminal purposes."

"For what criminal purposes?"

"For the sake of robbing it."

Beatrice Van Tuyl looked at me with her wide-open
azure eyes. Then she suddenly bubbled over with
golden and liquid-noted laughter. "Oh, Witter, you're
lovely!"

"What proof have you got of that?" demanded Jim.

"Of my loveliness?" I inquired, for Jim Van Tuyl's
solidity was as provocative as that of the smithy anvil
which the idler can not pass without at least a hammer-
tap or two. Yet it was this same solidity, I knew, that
made him the safest of financiers and the shrewdest
of investors.

"No," he retorted, "proofs of the fact that Wilkins
is here for other than honest purposes."

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 161

"I've no proof," I had to confess.

"Then what evidence have you?"

"I've not even any evidence as yet. But I'm not
stirring up this sort of thing without good reason."

"Let's hope not!" retorted Jim.

"My dear Witter, you're actually getting fussy in
your old age," said the laughing woman. It was only
the solemnity of her husband's face that seemed to
sober her. "Can't you see it's absurd? We're all
here, safe and sound, and we haven't been robbed."

"But what I want to know," went on the heavier
artillery, "is what your reasons are. It seems only
right we should inquire what you've got in the shape
of evidence."

"What I have wouldn't be admitted as evidence," I
confessed.

He threw down his cigarette. It meant as much as
throwing up his hands.

"Then what do you expect us to do?"

"I don't expect you to do anything. All I ask is
that you let me try to justify this course I've taken,
that the three of us dine quietly together. And unless
I'm greatly mistaken, before that dinner is over I think
I can show you that this man — "

I saw Beatrice Van Tuyl suddenly lift a forefinger
to her lip. The motion for silence brought me up
short. A moment later I heard the snap of a light-
switch in the hallway outside and then the click of
jade curtain-rings on their pole. Into the doorway
stepped a figure in black, a calm and slow-moving and
altogether self-assured figure.

1 62 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Dinner is served," intoned this sober personage,
with a curate-like solemnity all his own.

I had no wish to gape at the man, but that first
glimpse of mine was a sharp one, for I knew that it
was Wilkins himself that I was confronting. As I
beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterial as-
surance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in
the diaphragm. I asked myself in the name of all the
Lares and Penates of Manhattan, why I had suddenly
.gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag an inoffensive
butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare?

Then I looked at the man more closely. He wore
'the conventional dress livery of twilled worsted, with an
extremely high-winged collar and an extremely small
lawn tie. He seemed a remarkably solid figure of a
man, and his height was not insignificant. Any im-
pression of fragility, of sedentary bloodlessness, which
might have been given out by his quite pallid face,
was sharply contradicted by the muscular heaviness of
his limbs. His hair, a Kyrle-Bellewish gray over the
temples, was cut short. The well-powdered and close-
shaven face was bluish white along the jowls, like a
priest's. The poise of the figure, whether natural or
simulated, was one marked for servitude.

Yet I had to admit to myself, as we filed out and
down to the dining-room, that the man was not with-
out his pretended sense of dignity. He seemed neither
arrogant nor obsequious. He hovered midway between
the Scylla of hauteur and the Charybdis of considerate
patience. About the immobile and mask-like face hung
that veil of impersonality which marked him as a but-

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 163

ler — as a butler to the finger-tips. When not actually
in movement he was as aloofly detached as a totem-
pole. He stood as unobtrusive as a newel-post, as im-
passive as some shielding piece of furniture, beside
which youth might whisper its weightiest secret or con-
spiracy weave its darkest web.

I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements
about that china-strewn oblong of damask which
seemed his fit and rightful domain, that he was in no
way wanting in the part — the only thing that puzzled
me was the futility of that part. There was authority,
too, in his merest finger-movement and eye-shift, as
from time to time he signaled to the footman who
helped him in his duties. There was grave solicitude
on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod
of the woman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this
was the man, with his stolid air of exactitude, with his
quick-handed movements and his alert and yet unpar-
ticipating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet house-
hold to proclaim a thief !

I watched his hands every course as I sat there
talking against time — and Heaven knows what I talked
of ! But about those hands there was nothing to dis-
cover. In the first thing of importance I had met
with disappointment. For the cuffs that projected
from the edges of the livery sleeves covered each large-
boned wrist. In the actual deportment of the man
there was nothing on which to base a decent suspicion.
And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all
such dinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward
appearances, harmoniously and happily.

1 64 THE .MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

But as it progressed I grew more and more per-
plexed. There was another nauseating moment or two
when the thought flashed over me that the whole thing
was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear
in my restless moments of the night before was only
a dream projected into a period of wakefulness.
Equipped with nothing more than an echo from this
dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run
down a man who had proved and was proving himself
the acme of decorous respectability.

But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also
a sickly one. Like all sickly things, too, it tended to
die young. It went down before the crowding actuali-
ties of other circumstances which I could not overlook.
Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more than
fortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I
had heard what I had heard. There was still some
method by which I could verify or contradict my sus-
picion. My problem was to find a plan. And the
gravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way
reflected in my face.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked
Van Tuyl, with his heavy matter-of-factness, at a mo-
ment when the room happened to be empty.

"Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with
a self-assuring glance about the rose-shaded table and
then a wider glance about the room itself.

"Wait," I suddenly said. "What were his refer-
ences ?"

"He gave us a splendid one from the Whippeny
Club. We verified that. Then he had letters, six of

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER i

them from some very decent people in London. One
of them was a bishop."

"Did you verify those?"

"Across the Atlantic, Witter? It really didn't seem
worth while !"

"And it's lucky for him you didn't !"

"Why?"

"Because they're forgeries, every one of them!"

"What ground have you for thinking that?" asked
the solemn Van Tuyl.

"I don't think it — I know it. And, I imagine, I can
tell you the name of the man who forged them for
him."

"Well, what is it?"

"A worthy by the name of Turk McMeekin."

Van Tuyl sat up with a heavy purpose on his honest
and unimaginative face.

"We've had a nice lot of this mystery, Witter, but
we've got to get to the end of it. Tell me what you
know, everything, and I'll have him in here and face
him with it. Now, what is there beside the Turk Mc-
Meekin item?"

"Not yet!" murmured Beatrice Van Tuyl warn-
ingly, as Wilkins and his mask-like face advanced into
the room.

I had the feeling, as he served us with one of those
delectable ices which make even the epicureanism of
the Cyrenaics tame in retrospect, that we were de-
liberately conspiring against our own well-being, that
we were dethroning our own peace of mind. We were
sitting there scheming to undo the agency whose sole

1 66 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

function was to minister to our delights. And I could
not help wondering why, if the man was indeed what
I suspected, he chose to follow the most precarious and
the most ill-paid of all professions. I found it hard
to persuade myself that behind that stolid blue-white
mask of a face could flicker any wayward spirit of ad-
venture — and yet without that spirit my whole case
was a card house of absurdities.

I noticed that for the first time Beatrice Van Tuyl's
own eyes dwelt with a quick and searching look on
her servant's immobile face. Then I felt her equally
searching gaze directed at me. I knew that my failure
to make good would meet with s-cant forgiveness. She
would demand knowledge, even though it led to the
discovery of the volcano's imminence. And after so
much smoke it was plainly my duty to show where the
fire lay.

I seized the conversation by the tail, as it were, and
dragged it back into the avenues of inconsequentiality.
We sat there, the three of us, actually making talk for
the sake of a putty-faced servant. I noticed, though,
that as he rounded the table he repeatedly fell under
the quickly questioning gaze of both his master and
mistress. I began to feel like an Iago who had will-
fully polluted a dovecote of hitherto unshaken trust. It
became harder and harder to keep up my pretense of
artless good humor. Time was flying, and nothing
had as yet been found out.

"Now," demanded Van Tuyl, when the room was
once more empty, "what are you sure of?"

"I'm sure of nothing," I had to confess.

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 167

"Then what do you propose doing?" was the some-
what arctic inquiry.

I glanced up at the wall where Ezekiah Van Tuyl.
the worthy founder of the American branch of the
family, frowned reprovingly down at me over his
swathing black stock.

"I propose," was my answer, "having your great
grandfather up there let us know whether I am right
or whether I am wrong."

And as Wilkins stepped into the room I rose from
the table, walked over to the heavy-framed portrait, and
lifted it from its hook. I held it there, with a pretense
of studying the face for a moment or two. Then I
placed my table napkin on a chair, mounted it, and
made an unsuccessful effort to rehang the portrait.

"If you please, Wilkins," I said, still holding the
picture flat against the wall.

"A little higher," I told him, as I strained to loop
the cord back over its hook. I was not especially suc-
cessful at this, because at the time my eyes were di-
rected toward the hands of the man holding up the
picture.

His position was such that the sleeves of his black
service coat were drawn away from the white and
heavy-boned wrists. And there, before my eyes, across
the flexor cords of the right wrist was a wide and
ragged scar at least three inches in length.

I returned to my place at the dinner table. Van
Tuyl, by this time, was gazing at me with both re-
sentment and wonder.

"Shall we have coffee up-stairs?" his wife asked

1 68 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

with unruffled composure. I could see her eye meet
her husband's.

"Here, please," I interpolated.

"We'll have coffee served here," Beatrice Van Tuyl
said to her butler.

"Very good, madam," he answered.

I wondered, as I watched him cross the room, if
he suspected anything. I also wondered how hare-
brained the man and woman seated at the table thought

me.

"Listen," I said, the moment we were alone ; "have
you a servant here you can trust, one you can trust
implicitly ?"

"Of course," answered my hostess.

"Who is it?"

"Wilkins," was the answer.

"Not counting Wilkins?"

"Well, I think I can also trust my maid Felice — un-
less you know her better than I do."

I could afford to ignore the thrust.

"Then I'd advise you to send her up to look over
your things at once."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because now I know this man Wilkins is a crimi-
nal of the worst type!"

"You know it?"

"Yes, I know it as well as I know I'm sitting at this
table. And I can prove it."

"How?" demanded Van Tuyl.

"I'll show you how in a very few moments. And,
on second thoughts, I'd have that maid Felice bring

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 169

what you regard as valuable right to this dining-room
— I mean your jewels and things."

"But this sounds so silly," demurred my still re-
luctant hostess.

"It won't sound half so silly as a Tiffany advertise-
ment of a reward and no questions asked."

Beatrice Van Tuyl intercepted a footman and sent
him off for the maid Felice. A moment later Wilkins
was at our side quietly serving the cafe noir in tiny
gold-lined cups.

"This method of mine for identifying the real pearl,
as you will see," I blandly went on, "is a very simple
one. You merely take a match end and dip it in clear
water. Then you let a drop of water fall on the pearl.
If the stone is an imitation one the water-drop will
spread and lie close to the surface. If the stone is
genuine the drop will stand high and rounded, like a
globe of quicksilver, and will shake wTith the minute
vibrations which pass through any body not in perfect
equilibrium."

Before I had completed that speech the maid Felice
had stepped into the room. She was a woman of about
thirty, white-skinned, slender of figure, and decidedly
foreign-looking. Her face was a clever one, though I
promptly disliked an affectation of languor with which
she strove to hide a spirit which was only too plainly
alert.

"I want you to fetch my jewel case from the boudoir
safe," her mistress told her. "Bring everything in the
box."

I could not see the maid's face, for at that moment

i;o THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I was busy watching Wilkins. From that worthy,
however, came no slightest sign of disturbance or
wonder.

"Here, madam?" the maid was asking.

"Yes, here and at once, please," answered Beatrice
Van Tuyl. Then she turned to me. "And since you're
such a jewel expert you'll be able to tell me what's
darkening those turquoises of mine."

I dropped a lump of sugar into my coffee and sipped
it. Wilkins opened a dark-wooded buffet humidor be-
fore me, and I picked out a slender-waisted Havana
corseted in a band of gold. I suddenly looked up at
the man as he stood at my side holding the blue-flamed
little alcohol lamp for the contact of my waiting cigar
end.

"Wilkins, how did you get that scar?" I asked him,
out of a clear sky. The wrist itself was covered by its
cuff and sleeve end, but under them, I knew, was the
telltale mark.

"What scar, sir?" he asked, his politeness touched
with an indulgent patience which seemed to imply that
he was not altogether unused to facing gentlemen in
unaccountably high spirits.

"This one!" I said, catching his hand in mine and
running the cuff back along the white forearm. Not
one trace of either alarm or resentment could I see on
that indecipherable countenance. I almost began to
admire the man. In his way he was superb.

"Oh, that, sir!" he exclaimed, with an almost offen-
sively condoning glance at the Van Tuyls, as though
inquiring whether or not he should reply to a question

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 171

at once so personal and at the same time so out of
place.

"Tell him where you got it, Wilkins," said Beatrice
Van Tuyl, so s-harply that it practically amounted to
a command.

"I got it stopping Lord Entristle's brougham,
madam, in London, seven years ago," was the quiet
and unhesitating answer.

"How?" sharply asked the woman.

"I was footman for his lordship then, madam," went
on the quiet and patient-noted voice. "I had just
taken cards in when the horses were frightened by a
tandem bicycle going past. They threw Siddons, the
coachman, off the box as they jumped, and overturned
the vehicle. His lordship was inside. I got the reins
as one of the horses went down. But he kicked me
against the broken glass and I threw out one hand, I
fancy, to save myself."

"And the coach glass cut your wrist?" asked Van
Tuyl.

"Yes, sir," replied the servant, moving with methodic
slowness on his way about the table. His figure, in
its somber badge of livery, seemed almost a pathetic
one. There was no anxiety on his face, no shadow of
fear about the mild and unparticipating eyes. I was
suddenly conscious of my unjust superiority over him
— a superiority of station, of birth, of momentary
knowledge.

The silence that ensued was not a pleasant one. I
felt almost grateful for the timely entrance of the maid
Felice. In her hands she carried a japanned tin box,

172 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

about the size of a theatrical makeup box. This she
placed on the table beside her mistress.

"Is there anything else, madam?" she asked.

"That is all," answered Beatrice Van Tuyl as she
threw back the lid of the japanned box. I noticed that
although the key stood in it, it was unlocked. Then
my hostess looked up at the waiting butler. "And,
Wilkins, you can leave the cigars and liqueur on the
table. I'll ring if I want anything."

The carefully coiffured blonde head was bent low
over the box as the servants stepped out of the room.
The delicate fingers probed through the array of
leather-covered cases. I could see by her face, even
before she spoke, that the box's contents were intact.

"You see," she said, ladling handful after handful
of glittering jewelry out on the white table-cloth be-
tween her coffee-cup and mine, "everything is here.
Those are my rings. There's the dog collar. There's
angel Jim's sunburst. Here's the ordinary family junk."

I sat for a moment studying that Oriental array of
feminine adornment. It was plainly an array of evi-
dence to discountenance me. I felt a distinct sense of
relief when the woman in blue suddenly dropped her
eyes from my face to her jewel box again. It was
Van Tuyl's persistent stare that roweled me into final
activity.

"Then so far, we're in luck! And as from now on
I want to be responsible for what happens," I said, as
I reached over and gathered the glittering mass up in
a table napkin, "I think it will simplify things if you,
Van Tuyl, take possession of these."

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 173

I tied the napkin securely together and handed it
to my wondering host. Then I dropped a silver bon-
bon dish and a bunch of hothouse grapes into the
emptied box, locking it and handing the key back to
Beatrice Van Tuyl.

That lady looked neither at me nor the key. In-
stead, she sat staring meditatively into space, appar-
ently weighing some question in which the rest of that
company could claim no interest. It was only after
her husband had spoken her name, sharply, that she
came back to her immediate surroundings.

"And now what must I do ?" she asked, with a new
note of seriousness.

"Have the maid take the box back to where it came
from," I told her. "But be so good as to retain the
key."

"And then what?" mocked Van Tuyl.

"Then," cut in his wife, with a sudden note of
antagonism which I could not account for, "the sooner
•we send for the police the better."

An answering note of antagonism showed on Van
Tuyl's face.

"I tell you, Kerfoot, I can't do it," he objected, even
as his wife rang the bell. "You've got to show me!"

"Please be still, Jim," she said, as Wilkins stepped
into the room. She turned an impassive face to the
waiting servant. "Will you ask Felice to come here."

None of us spoke until Felice entered the room.
Wilkins, I noticed, followed her in, but passed across
the room's full length and went out by the door in the
rear.

174 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Felice," said the woman beside me, very calmly
and coolly, "I want you to take this box back to the
safe."

"Yes, madam."

"Then go to the telephone in the study and ring up
police headquarters. Tell them who you are. Then
explain that I want them to send an officer here, at
once.'*

"Yes, madam," answered the attentive-faced maid.

"Felice, you had better ask them to send two men,
two—"

"Two plain-clothes men," I prompted.

"Yes, two plain-clothes men. And explain to them
that they are to arrest the man-servant who opens the
door for them — at once, and without any fuss. Is that
quite clear?"

"Yes, madam, quite clear," answered the maid.

"Then please hurry."

"Yes, madam."

I looked up at Van Tuyl's audible splutter of in-
dignation.

"Excuse me" he cried, "but isn't all this getting just
a little highhanded? Aren't we making things into a
nice mess for ourselves? Aren't we moving just a
little too fast in this game, calling out the reserves
because you happen to spot a scar on my butler's
wrist?"

"I tell you, Jim," I cried with all the earnestness at
my command, "the man's a thief, a criminal with a
criminal's record!"

"Then prove it !" demanded Jim.

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 175

"Call him in and I will."

Van Tuyl made a motion for his wife to touch the
bell.

Her slippered toe was still on the rug-covered button
when Wilkins entered, the same austere and self-as-
sured figure.

"Wilkins," said Van Tuyl, and there was an out-
spoken and deliberate savagery in his voice even as
his wife motioned to him in what seemed a signal for
moderation, "Wilkins, I regard you as an especially
good servant. Mr. Kerfoot, on the other hand, says
he knows you and says you are not."

"Yes, sir," said Wilkins with his totem-pole ab-
straction.

There was something especially maddening in that
sustained calmness of his.

"And what's more," I suddenly cried, exasperated
by that play-acting role and rising and confronting him
as he stood there, "your name's not Wilkins, and you
never got that wrist scar from a coach door."

"Why not, sir?" he gently but most respectfully in-
quired.

"Because," I cried, stepping still nearer and watch-
ing the immobile blue-white face, "in the gang you
work with you're known as Sir Henry, and you got
that cut on the wrist from a wedge when you tried to
blow open a safe door, and the letters of introduction
which you brought to the Whippeny Club were forged
by an expert named Turk McMeekin ; and I know what
brought you into this house and what your plans for
robbing it are !"

iy6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

There was not one move of his body as he stood
there. There was not one twitch of his mask-like face.
But on that face, point by point, came a slow suf-
fusion of something akin to expression. It was not
fear. To call it fear would be doing the man an in-
justice. It began with the eyes, and spread from
feature to feature, very much, I imagine, as sentient
life must have spread across the countenance of Pyg-
malion's slowly awakening marble.

For one fraction of a moment the almost pitiful eyes
looked at me with a quick and imploring glance. Then
the mask once more descended over them. He was
himself again. And I felt almost sure that in the mel-
lowed light about us the other two figures at the table
had not seen that face as I did.

There was, in fact, something almost like shame
on Van Tuyl's heavy face as the calm-voiced servant,
utterly ignoring me and my words, turned to him and
asked if he should remove the things.

"You haven't answered the gentleman," said Bea-
trice Van Tuyl, in a voice a little shrill with excite-
ment.

"What is there to answer, madam ?" he mildly asked.
"It's all the young gentleman's foolishness, some fool-
ishness which I can't understand."

"But the thing can't stand like this," protested the
ponderous Van Tuyl.

There must have been something reassuring to them
both in the methodic calmness with which this calum-
niated factor in their domestic Eden moved about once
more performing his petty domestic duties.

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 177

"Then you deny everything he says?" insisted the
woman.

The servant stopped and looked up in mild reproof.

"Of course, madam," he replied, as he slowly re-
moved the liqueur glasses. I saw my hostess look after
him with one of her long and abstracted glances. She
was still peering into his face as he stepped back to the
table. She was, indeed, still gazing at him when the
muffled shrill of an electric bell announced there was
a caller at the street door.

"Wilkins," she said, almost ruminatively, "I want
you to answer the door — the street door."

"Yes, madam," he answered, without hesitation.

The three of us sat in silence, as the slow and
methodic steps crossed the room, stepped out into the
hall, and advanced to what at least one of us knew to
be his doom. It was Van Tuyl himself who spoke up
out of the silence.

"What's up?" he asked. "What's he gone for?"

"The police are there," answered his wife.

"Good God !" exclaimed the astounded husband, now
on his feet. "You don't mean you've sprung that trap
on the poor devil ? You — "

"Sit down, Jim," broke in his wife with enforced
calmness. "Sit down and wait."

"But I won't be made a fool of !"

"You're not being made a fool of!"

"But who's arresting this man? Who's got the
evidence to justify what's being done here?"

"I have," was the woman's answer.

"What do you mean?"

i;8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

She was very calm about it.

"I mean that Witter was right. My Baroda pearls
and the emerald pendant were not in the safe. They're
gone."

"They're gone?" echoed the incredulous husband.

"Listen," I suddenly cried, as Van Tuyl sat digest-
ing his discovery. We heard the sound of steps, the
slam of a door, and the departing hum of a motor-car.
Before I realized what she was doing Beatrice Van
Tuyl's foot was once more on the call bell. A foot-
man answered the summons.

"Go to the street door," she commanded, "and see
who's there."

We waited, listening. The silence lengthened.
Something about that silence impressed me as omi-
nous. We were still intently listening as the footman
stepped back into the room.

"It's the chauffeur, sir," he explained.

"And what does he want ?"

"He said Felice telephoned for the car a quarter of
an hour ago."

"Send Felice to me," commanded my hostess.

"I don't think I can, ma'am. She's gone in the car
with Wilkins."

"With Wilkins?"

"Yes, ma'am. Markson says he can't make it out,
ma'am, Wilkins driving off that way without so much
as a by-your-leave, ma'am."

The three of us rose as one from the table. For a
second or two we stood staring at one another.

Then Van Tuyl suddenly dived for the stairs, with

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER 179

the napkin full of jewelry in his hand. I, in turn, dived
for the street door. But before I opened it I knew
it was too late.

I suddenly stepped back into the hallway, to confront
Beatrice Van Tuyl.

"How long have you had Felice?" I asked, groping
impotently about the hall closet for my hat and coat.

"She came two weeks before Wilkins," was the
answer.

"Then you see what this means?" I asked, still grop-
ing about for my overcoat.

"What can it mean ?"

"They were working together — they were confed-
erates."

Van Tuyl descended the stairs still carrying the
table napkin full of jewelry. His eyes were wide with
indignant wonder.

"It's gone!" he gasped. "He's taken your box!"

I emerged from the hall closet both a little startled
and a little humiliated.

"Yes, and he's taken my hat and coat," I sadly con-
fessed.

CHAPTER VII

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS

IT is one of life's little ironies, I suppose, that man's
surest escape from misery should be through the
contemplation of people more miserable than himself.
Such, however, happens to be the case. And prompted
by this genial cross between a stoic and a cynic philos-
ophy, I had formed the habit of periodically submerg-
ing myself in a bath of cleansing depravity.

The hopelessness of my fellow-beings, I found,
seemed to give me something to live for. Collision
with lives so putrescently abominable that my own
by contrast seemed enviable, had a tendency to make
me forget my troubles. And this developed me into
a sort of calamity chaser. It still carried me, on those
nights when sleep seemed beyond my reach, to many
devious and astounding corners of the city, to unsavory
cellars where lemon-steerers and slough-beaters fore-
gathered, to ill-lit rooms where anarchists nightly ate
the fire of their own ineffectual oratory, to heavy-
fumed drinking-places where pocket-slashers and till—
tappers and dummy-chuckers and dips forgot their
more arduous hours.

But more and more often I found my steps uncon-
sciously directed toward that particular den of sub-
terranean iniquities known as The Cafe of Failures.
For it was in this new-world Cabaret dn Neant that

1 80

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 181

I had first heard of that engaging butler known to
his confederates as "Sir Henry." And I still had
hopes of recovering my stolen great-coat.

Night by night I went back to that dimly lit den of
life's discards, the same as a bewildered beagle goes
back to its last trace of aniseed. I grew inured to its
bad air, unobservant of its scorbutic waiters, undis-
turbed by its ominous-looking warren of private rooms,
and apathetic before its meretricious blondes.

Yet at no time was I one of the circle about me. At
no time was I anything more than a spectator of their
ever-shifting and ever-mystifying dramas. And this
not unnatural secretiveness on their part, combined
with a not unnatural curiosity of my own, finally com-
pelled me to a method of espionage in which I grew
to take some little pride.

This method, for all its ingenuity, was simple enough
to any one of even ordinary scientific attainments.
When I found, for example, that the more select of
those underworld conferences invariably took place in
one of that tier of wood-partitioned drinking-rooms
which lined the cafe's east side, I perceived that if I
could not invade those rooms in body I might at least
be there in another form. So with the help of my
friend Durkin, the reformed wire-tapper, I acquired a
piece of machinery for the projection of the spirit into
unwelcome corners.

This instrument, in fact, was little more than an en-
largement of the ordinary telephone transmitter. It
was made by attaching to an oblong of glass, constitut-
ing of course, an insulated base, two carbon supports,

182 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

with cavities, and four cross-pieces, also of carbon,
with pointed ends, fitting loosely into the cavities
placed along the side of the two supports. The result
was> this carbon being what electricians call "a high
resistance" and the loose contact-points where the lat-
erals rested making resistance "still higher, that all
vibration, however minute, jarred the points against
their supports and varied resistance in proportion to
the vibration itself. This, of course, produced a chang-
ing current in the "primary" of the induction coil, and
was in turn reproduced, greatly magnified, in the "sec-
ondary" where with the help of a small watch-case
receiver it could be easily heard.

In other words, I acquired a mechanical sound-mag-
nifier, a microphone, an instrument, of late called the
dictaphone, which translates the lightest tap of a pen-
cil-end into something which reached the ear with the
force of a hammer-blow. And the whole thing,, bat-
ter}', coil, insulated wire, carbon bars and glass base,
could be carried in its leather case or thrust under my
coat as easily as a folded opera hat.

It was equally easy, I found, to let it hang flat
against the side wall of that rancid little chambre par-
ticuliere which stood next to the room where most of
those star-chamber conspiracies seemed to take place.
My method of adjusting the microphone was quite
simple.

From the painted wooden partition I lifted down
the gilt-framed picture of a bacchanalian lady whose
semi-nudity disseminated the virtues of a champagne
which I knew to be made from the refuse of the humble

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 183

apple-evaporator. At the top-most edge of the square
of dust where this picture had stood, I carefully
screwed two L-hooks and on these hooks hung my
microphone-base. Then I rehung the picture, leaving
it there to screen my apparatus. My cloth-covered
wires, which ran from this picture to the back of the
worn leather couch against the wall, I very nicely con-
cealed by pinning close under a stretch of gas pipe and
poking in under the edge of the tattered brown lino-
leum.

Yet it was only on the third evening of my mildly
exhilarating occupation in that stuffy little camera
obscura that certain things occurred to rob my espion-
age of its impersonal and half-hearted excitement. I
had ordered a bottle of Chianti and gone into that
room to all intents and purposes a diffident and maun-
dering bon-vivant looking for nothing more than a
quiet corner wherein to doze.

Yet for one long hour I had sat in that secret audi-
torium, with my watch-case receiver at my ear, while
a garrulous quartette of strike-breakers enlarged on the
beatitude of beating up a "cop" who had ill-used one
of their number.

It must have been a full half hour after they had
gone before I again lifted the phone to my ear. What
I heard this time was another man's voice, alert, eager,
a little high-pitched with excitement.

"I tell you, Chuck," this thin eager voice was declar-
ing, "the thing's a pipe! I got it worked out like a
game o' checkers. But Redney 'nd me can't do a thing
unless you stake us to a boat and a batch o' tools !"

1 84 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"What kind o' tools?" asked a deep and cavernous
bass voice. In that voice I could feel caution and
stolidity, even an overtone of autocratic indifference.

"Ten bones'd get the whole outfit," was the other's
answer.

"But what kind o' tools?" insisted the unperturbed
bass voice.

There was a second or two of silence.

"That's spielin' the whole song," demurred the other.

"Well, the whole song's what I want to know," was
the calm and cavernous answer. "You'll recall that
three weeks ago I staked you boys for that express-
wagon job — and I ain't seen nothing from it yet !"

"Aw, that was a frame-up," protested the first
speaker. "Some squealer was layin' for us !"

It was a new voice that spoke next, a husky and
quavering voice, as though it came from an alkaline
throat not infrequently irrigated with fusel-oil whisky.

"Tony, we got to let Chuck in on this. We got to !"

"Why've we got to?"

"Two men can't work it alone," complained the
latest speaker. "You know that. We can't take
chances — and Gawd knows there's enough for three in
this haul!"

Again there was a brief silence.

"You make me sick!" suddenly exploded the treble-
voiced youth who had first spoken. "You'd think it
was me. who's been singin' about keepin' this thing so
quiet!"

"What're you boys beefin' about, anywray?" inter-
posed the placid bass voice.

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 185

"I ain't beefin' about you. I ain't kickin' against
lettin' you in. But what I want to know is how're we
goin' to split when you are in ? Who follied this thing
up from the first? Who did the dirty work on it?
Who nosed round that pier and measured her off, and
got a bead on the whole lay-out?"

"Then what'd you take me in for?" demanded the
worthy called Redney. "Why didn't you go ahead and
hog the whole thing, without havin' me trailin' round ?"

"Cut that out. You know I've got to have help,"
was the treble-noted retort. "You know it's too big
for one guy to handle."

"And it's so big you've got to have a boat and out-
fit," suggested the bass-voiced man. "And I'll bet
you and Redney can't raise two bits between you."

"But you, get me a tub with a kicker in, and two or
three tools, and then you've got the nerve to hold me
up for a third rakeoff!"

"I don't see as I'm holdin' anybody up," retorted
the deep-voiced man. "You came to me, and I told
you I was ready to talk business. You said you wanted
help. Well, if you want help you've got to pay for it,
same as I pay for those cigars."

"I'm willin' to pay for it," answered the high-voiced
youth, with a quietness not altogether divorced from
sulkiness.

"Then what're we wastin' good time over ?" inquired
the man known as Redney. "This ain't a case o' milk-
in' coffee-bags from a slip-lighter. This haul's big
enough for three."

"Well, what is your haul?" demanded the bass voice.

1 86 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Again there was a silence of several seconds.

"Cough it up," prompted Redney. The silence that
ensued seemed to imply that the younger man was
slowly and reluctantly arriving at a change of front.
There was a sound of a chair being pushed back, of a
match being struck, of a glass being put down on a
table-top.

"Chuck," said the treble-voiced youth, with a slow
and impressive solemnity that was strangely in con-
trast to his earlier speech, "Chuck, we're up against
the biggest stunt that was ever pulled off in this burg
of two-bone pikers!"

"So you've been insinuatin'," was the answer that
came out of the silence. "But I've been sittin' here
half an hour waitin' to get a line on what you're chew-
in' about."

"Chuck," said the treble voice, "you read the papers,
don't you ?"

"Now and then," acknowledged the diffident bass
voice.

"Well, did you see yesterday morning where the
steamer Finance was rammed by the White Star
Georgicf Where she went down in the Lower Bay
before she got started on her way south?"

"I sure did."

"Well, did you read about her carryin' six hundred
and ten thousand dollars in gold — in gold taken from
the Sub-Treasury here and done up in wooden boxes
and consigned for that Panama Construction Com-

P'ny."

"I sure did."

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 187

'And did your eye fall on the item that all day
yesterday the divers from the wreckin' comp'ny were
workin' on that steamer, workin' like niggers gettin'
that gold out of her strong room?"

"Sure!"

"And do you happen to know where that gold is
now?" was the oratorical challenge flung at the other
man.

"Just wait a minute," remarked that other man in
his heavy guttural. "Is that your coup?"

"That's my coup!" was the confident retort.

"Well, you've picked a lemon," the big man calmly
announced. "There's nothin' doin', kiddo, nothin'
doin'!"

"Not on your life," was the tense retort. "I know
what I'm talkin' about. And Redney knows."

"And / know that gold went south on the steamer
Advance," proclaimed the bass voice. "I happen to
know they re-shipped the whole bunch o' metal on their
second steamer."

"Where'd you find that out?" demanded the scof-
fing treble voice.

"Not bein' in the Sub-Treasury this season, I had
to fall back on the papers for the news."

"And that's where you and the papers is in dead
wrong! That's how they're foolin' you and ev'ry
other guy not in the know. I'll tell you where that
gold is. I'll tell you where it lies, to the foot, at this
minute!"

"Well?"

"She's lyin' in the store-room in a pile o' wooden

iSS THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

boxes, on that Panama Comp'ny's pier down at the
foot o' Twenty-eight' Street !"

"You're dreamin', Tony, dreamin'. No sane folks
leave gold lyin' round loose that way. No, sir; that's
what they've got a nice stone Sub-Treasury for."

"Look a' here, Chuck," went on the tense treble
voice. "Jus' figure out what day this is. And find
out when them wreckers got that gold out o' the
Finance's strong room. And what d'you get? They
lightered them boxes up the North River at one o'clock
Saturday afternoon. They swung in next to the Ad-
vance and put a half-a-dozen cases o' lead paint aboard.
Then they tarpaulined them boxes o' gold and swung
into the Panama Comp'ny's slip and unloaded that
cargo at two o'clock Saturday afternoon!"

'"Well, s'pose they did?" "

"Don't you tumble? Saturday afternoon there's no
Sub-Treasury open. And to-day's Sunday, ain't it?
And they won't get into that Sub-Treasury until to-
morrow morning. And as sure as I know I'm sittin'
in this chair I know that gold's lyin' out there on that
Twenty-eight' Street pier!"

No one in that little room seemed to stir. They
seemed to be sitting in silent tableau. Then I could
hear the man with the bass voice slowly and medita-
tively intone his low-life expletive.

"Well, I'll be damned!"

The youngest of the trio spoke again, in a lowered
but none the less tense voice.

"In gold, Chuck, pure gold ! In fine yellow gold
lyin' there waitin' to be rolled over and looked after!

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 189

Talk about treasure-huntin' ! Talk about Spanish
Mains and pirate ships! My Gawd, Chuck, we don't
need to travel down to no Mosquito Coast to dig up
our doubloons! We got 'em right here at our back
door!"

Some one struck a match.

"But how're we goin' to pick 'em?" placidly inquired
the man called Chuck. It was as apparent that he al-
ready counted himself one of the party as it was that
their intention had not quite carried him off his feet.

"Look here," broke in the more fiery-minded youth
known as Tony, and from the sound and the short
interludes of silence he seemed to be drawing a map
on a slip of paper. "Here's your pier. And here's
your store-room. And here's where your gold lies.
And here's the first door. And here's the second. We
don't need to count on the doors. They've got a watch-
man somewhere about here. And they've put two of
their special guards here at the land end of the pier.
The store-room itself is empty. They've got it double-
locked, and a closed-circuit alarm system to cinch the
thing. But what t'ell use is all that when we can eat
right straight up into the bowels o' that room without
touchin' a lock or a burglar alarm, without makin' a
sound!"

"How?" inquired the bass voice.

"Here's your pier bottom. Here's the river slip.
We row into that slip without showin' a light, and
with the kicker shut off, naturally. We slide in under
without makin' a sound. Then we get our measure-
ments. Then we make fast to this pile, and throw out

190 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

a line to this one, and a second to this one, to hold us
steady against the tide and the ferry wash. Then we
find our right plank. We can do that by pokin' a
flashlight up against 'em where it'll never be seen.
Then we take a brace and bit and run a row of holes
across that plank, the two rows about thirty inches
apart, each hole touchin' the other. Don't you see, with
a good sharp extension bit we can cut out that square
in half an hour or so, without makin' any more noise
than you'd make scratchin' a match on your pants
leg!"

"And when you get your square?"

"Then Redney and me climbs through. Redney'll
be the stall. He watches the door from the inside.
You stay in the boat, with an eye peeled below. I
pass you the gold. We cut loose and slip off with the
tide. When we're out o' hearin' we throw on the
kicker and go kitin' down to that Bath Beach joint
o' yours where we'll have that six hundred and ten
thousand in gold melted down and weighed out before
thev get that store-room door unlocked in the morn-
ing!"

"Not so loud, Tony; not so loud!" cautioned the
conspirator called Redney. There was a moment of
silence.

In that silence, and without the aid of my micro-
phone, I heard the sound of steps as they approached
my door and came to a stop.

"Listen!" suddenly whispered one of the men in the
other room.

As I sat there, listening as intently as my neighbors,

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 191

the knob of my door turned. Then the door itself was
impatiently shaken.

That sound brought me to my feet with a start of
alarm. Accident had enmeshed me in a movement that
was too gigantic to be overlooked. The one thing I
could not afford, at such a time, was discovery.

Three silent steps took me across the room to my
microphone. One movement lifted that telltale instru-
ment from its hooks, and a second movement jerked
free the wires pinned in close along the gas pipe. An-
other movement or two saw my apparatus slipped into
its case and the case dropped down behind the worn
leather-couch back. Then I sank into the chair beside
the table, knowing there was nothing to betray me.
Yet as I lounged there over my bottle of Chianti I
could feel the excitement of the moment accelerate my
pulse. I made an effort to get my feelings under con-
trol as second by second slipped away and nothing of
importance took place. It was, I decided, my wall-
eyed waiter friend, doubtlessly bearing a message that
more lucrative patrons were desiring my fetid-aired
cubby-hole.

Then, of a sudden, I became aware of the fact that
voices were whispering close outside my door. The
next moment I heard the crunch of wood subjected
to pressure, and before I could move or realize the
full meaning of that sound, the door had been forced
open and three men were staring in at me.

I looked up at them with a start — with a start, how-
ever, which I had the inspired foresight to translate
into a hiccough. That hiccough, in turn, reminded me

192 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

that I had a role to sustain, a role of care-free and
irresponsible intoxication.

So, opprobrious as the whole farce seemed to me,
I pushed my hat back on my head and blinkingly stared
at the three intruders as they sauntered nonchalantly
into the room. Yet as I winked up at them, with ail
the sleepy unconcern at my command, I could plainly
enough see that each one of that trio was very much on
the alert. It was the youngest of the three who turned
to me.

"Kiddo," he said, and he spoke with an oily suavity
not at all to my liking, "I kind o' thought I smelt gas
leakin' in here."

He had the effrontery to turn and stare about at
the four walls of the room. Then he moved easily
across the floor to where the champagne picture hung.
What he saw, or did not see there, I had no means of
determining. For to turn and look after him would
be to betray my part.

"That leak ain't in this room," admitted the second
of the trio, a swarthy and loose-lipped land pirate with
a sweep of carroty bang which covered his left eye-
brow. I knew, even before he spoke, that he was the
man called Redney, just as I knew the first speaker
wras the youth they had addressed as Tony. About the
third man, who towered above the other two in his
giant-like stature, there was a sense of calm and solid-
ity that seemed almost pachydermatous. Yet this same
solidity in some way warned me that he might be the
most dangerous of them all.

" 'Sssh all righ'!" I loosely condoned, with a sleepy

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 193

lurch of the body. How much my acting was convinc-
ing to them was a matter of vast concern to me. The
man named Tony, who had continued to study the
wooden partition against which my microphone had
hung, turned back to the table and calmly seated him-
self beside me. My heart went down like an elevator
with a broken cable when I noticed the nervous sweat
which had come out on his forehead.

"Say, Sister, this puts the drinks on us," he de-
clared, with an airiness which I felt to be as unreal as
my own inebriacy. I saw him motion for the other
two to seat themselves.

They did so, a little mystified, each man keeping his
eyes fixed on the youth called Tony. The latter
laughed, for no reason that I could understand, and
over his shoulder bawled out the one word, "Shim-
mer !"

Shimmey, I remembered, was my friend the wall-
eyed waiter. And this waiter it was who stepped trail-
ingly into the room.

"Shimmey," said the voluble youth at my side. "We
introoded on this gen'lmun. And we got to square
ourselves. So what's it goin' to be?"

"Nothin' !" I protested, with a repugnant wave of
the hand.

"You mean we ain't good enough for you to drink
with?" demanded the youth called Tony. I could see
what he wanted. I could feel what was coming. He
was looking for some reason, however tenuous, to
start trouble. Without fail he would find it in time.
But my one desire was to defer that outcome as long

194 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

as possible. So I grinned back at him, rather idioti-
cally, I'm afraid.

"All righ'," I weakly agreed, blinking about at my
tormentors. "Bring me a bran'y an' soda."

The other three men looked at the waiter. The
waiter, in turn, looked at them. Then he studied my
face. There was something decidedly unpleasant in
his coldly speculative eyes.

"Shimmey, d'you understand ? This gen'lmun wants
a brandy and soda."

The waiter, still studying me, said "Sure!" Then
he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

I knew, in my prophetic bones, that there was some
form of trouble brewing in that odoriferous little
room. But I was determined to side-step it, to avoid
it, to the last extremity. And I was still nodding
amiably about when the waiter returned with his tray
of glasses.

"Well, here's how," said the youth, and we all lifted
our glasses.

That brandy and soda, I knew, would not be the
best of its kind. I also clearly saw that it would be
unwise to decline it. So I swallowed the stuff as a
child swallows medicine.

I downed it in a gulp or two, and put the glass
back on the table. Then I proceeded to wipe my
mouth with the back of my hand, after the approved
fashion of my environment.

It was fortunate, at that moment, that my hand was
well up in front of my face. For as the truth of the
whole thing came home to me, as sharp and quick as

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 195

an electric spark, there must have been a second or two
when my role slipped away from me.

I had, it is true, inwardly fortified myself against
a draught that would prove highly unpalatable. But
the taste which I now detected, the acrid, unmistakable,
over- familiar taste, was too much for my startled
nerves. I hid my sudden body-movement only by
means of a simulated hiccough. The thing I had un-
mistakably tasted was chloral hydrate. They had
given me knock-out drops.

The idea, of a sudden, struck me as being so ludi-
crous that I laughed. The mere thought of any such
maneuver was too much for me — the foolish hope that
a homeopathic little pill of chloral would put me under
the table, like any shopgirl lured from a dance-hall J
They were trying to drug me. Drug me, who had
taken double and triple doses night after night as I
fought for sleep !

They were trying to drug me, me who on my bad
nights had even known the narcotic to be forcibly
wrested from my clutch by those who stood appalled
at the quantities that my too-immured system de-
manded, and knew only too well that in time it meant
madness !

But I remembered, as I saw the three men staring
at me, that I still had a role to sustain. I knew it
would be unwise to let those sweet worthies know just
how the land lay. I enjoyed an advantage much too
exceptional and much too valuable to be lightly sur-
rendered.

So to all outward signs and appearances I let the

196 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

drug do its work. I carefully acted out my pretended
lapse into somnolent indifference. I lost the power to
coordinate; my speech grew inarticulate; my shoul-
ders drooped forward across the table edge. I wilted
down like a cut dock-weed, until my face lay flat
against the beer-stained wood.

"He's off," murmured the man called Chuck. He
rose to his feet as he spoke.

"Then we got to beat it," declared the youth named
Tony, already on his feet. I could hear him take a
deep breath as he stood there. "And the next long
nose who gives me heart disease like this is goin' to
get five inches o' cold steel !"

He knelt before me as he spoke, pulled back my feet,
and ran a knife edge along the shoe laces. Then he
promptly pulled the shoes from my feet. These shoes,
apparently, he kept in his hand. "That'll help anchor
'im, I guess," I heard him remark.

"Let's get on the job," suggested the big man, ob-
viously impatient at the delay. "If there's nothin' but
five inches o' plank between us and that gold, let's get
busy!"

I sat there, with my head on that table top so
redolent of the soured beverages of other days, and
listened to them as they moved across the room. I
listened as they passed out and swung the door shut
behind them. I waited there for another minute or
two, without moving, knowing only too well what a
second discovery would entail.

My head was still bent over that unclean table top
when I heard the broken-latched door once more

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 197

pushed slowly open, and steps slowly cross the floor
to where I sat.

Some one, I knew, was staring down at me. I felt
four distended finger-tips push inquisitively at my
head, rolling it a little to one side. Then the figure
bending above me shifted its position. A hand felt
cautiously about my body. It strayed lower, until it
reached my watch pocket.

I could see nothing of my enemy's face, and noth-
ing of his figure. All I got a glimpse of was a patch
of extremely soiled linen. But that glimpse was suf-
ficient. It was my friend, the wall-eyed waiter, reso-
lutely deciding to make hay while the sun shone. And
that decided me.

With one movement I rose from the chair and
wheeled about so as to face him. That quick body-
twist spun his own figure half-way around.

My fist caught him on the foreward side of the re-
laxed jawbone. He struck the worn leather couch as
he fell, and then rolled completely over, as inert as
a sack of bran.

I looked down at him for a moment or two as he
lay face upward on the floor. Then I dropped on one
knee beside him, unlaced his well-worn and square-
toed shoes, and calmly but quietly adjusted them to
my own feet.

Once out in the street I quickened my steps and
rounded the first corner. Then I hurried on, turning
still another, and still another, making doubly sure I
was leaving no chance to be trailed. Then I swung
aboard a cross-town car, alighting again at a corner

198 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

flashing with the vulgar brilliance of an all-night drug
store.

I went straight to the telephone booth of that drug
store, and there I promptly called up police headquar-
ters. I felt, as I asked for Lieutenant Belton, a person
of some importance. Then I waited while the precious
moments flew by.

Lieutenant Belton, I was finally informed, was at
his room in the Hotel York, on Seventh Avenue. So
I rang up the Hotel York, only to be informed that the
lieutenant was not in.

I slammed the receiver down on its hook and ended
that foolish colloquy. I first thought of Patrolman
McCooey. Then I thought of Doyle, and then of
Creegan, my old detective friend. Then with a jaw-
grip of determination I caught that receiver up again,
ordered a taxicab, paid for my calls, consulted my
watch, and paced up and down like a caged hyena,
waiting for my cab.

Another precious ten minutes slipped away before
I got to Creegan's door in Forty-third Street. Then I
punched the bell-button above the mail-box, and stood
there with my finger on it for exactly a minute and a
half.

I suddenly remembered that the clicking door
latch beside me implied that my entrance was being
automatically solicited. I stepped into the dimly light-
ed hall and made my way determinedly up the narrow
carpeted stairs, knowing I would get face to face with
Creegan if I had to crawl through a fanlight and pound
in his bedroom door.

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 199

But it was Creegan himself who confronted me as
I swung about the banister turn of that shadowy sec-
ond landing.

"You wake those kids up," he solemnly informed
me, "and I'll kill you!"

"Creegan," I cried, and it seemed foolish that I
should have to inveigle and coax him into a crusade
which meant infinitely more to him than to me, "I'm
going to make you famous !"

"How soon?" he diffidently inquired.

"Inside of two hours' time," was my answer.

"Don't wake those kids!" he commanded, looking
back over his shoulder.

I caught him by the sleeve, and held him there, for
some vague premonition of a sudden withdrawal and
a bolted door made me desperate. And time, I knew,
Was getting short.

"For heaven's sake, listen to me," I said as I held
him. And as he stood there under the singing gas-jet,
with his hurriedly lit and skeptically tilted stogie
in one corner of his mouth, I told him in as few words
as I could what had happened that night.

"Come in while I get me boots on," he quietly re-
marked, leading me into an unlighted hallway and from
that into a bedroom about the size of a ship's cabin.
"And speak low," he said, with a nod toward the rear
end of the hall. Then as he sat on the edge of the bed
pulling on his shoes he made me recount everything
for the second time, stopping me with an occasional
question, fixing me occasionally with a cogitative eye.

"But we haven't a minute to lose," I warned him,

200 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

for the second time, as he slipped away into a remoter
cubby-hole of a room to see, as he put it, "if the kidi
were keeping covered."

He rejoined me at the stairhead, with the softest
of Irish smiles still on his face. By the time we had
reached the street and stepped into the waiting taxi,
that smile had disappeared. He merely smoked
another stogie as we made our way toward the end
of Twenty-eighth Street.

At Tenth Avenue, he suddenly decided it was better
for us to go on foot. So he threw away his stogie end,
a little ruefully, and led me down a street as narrow
and empty as a river bed. He led me into a part of
New York that I had never before known. It was
a district of bald brick walls, of rough flag and cobble-
stone underfoot, of lonely street lamps, of shipping
platforms and unbroken warehouse sides, of storage
yards and milk depots, with railway tracks bisecting
streets as empty as though they were the streets of a
dead city. No one appeared before us. Nothing gave
signs of being alive in that area of desolate ugliness
which seemed like the back yard of all the world con-
centrated in a few huddled squares.

We were almost on West Street itself before I was
conscious of the periodic sound of boat whistles com-
plaining through the night. The air, I noticed, took
on a fresher and cleaner smell. Creegan, without
speaking, drew me in close to a wall-end, at the corner,
and together we stood staring out toward the Hudson.

Directly in front of us, beyond a forest of barrels
which stippled the asphalt, a veritable city of barrels

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 201

that looked like the stumpage of a burned-over Doug-
las-pine woodland, stood the facade of the Panama
Company's pier structure. It looked substantial and
solemn enough, under its sober sheeting of corru-
gated iron. And two equally solemn figures, somber
and silent in their dark overcoats, stood impassively
on guard before its closed doors.

"Come on," Creegan finally whispered, walking
quickly south to the end of Twenty-seventh Street.
He suddenly stopped and caught at my arm to arrest
my own steps. We stood there, listening. Out of the
silence, apparently from mid-river, sounded the quick
staccato coughing of a gasoline motor. It sounded
for a moment or two, and then it grew silent.

We stood there without moving. Then the figure
at my side seemed stung into sudden madness. With-
out a word of warning or explanation, my companion
clucked down and went dodging in and out between
the huddled clumps of barrels, threading a circuitous
path toward the slip edge. I saw him drop down on
all fours and peer over the string-piece. Then I saw
him draw back, rise to his feet, and run northward
toward the pier door where the two watchmen stood.

What he said to those watchmen I had no means of
knowing. One of them, however, swung about and
tattooed on the door with a night-stick before Creegan
could catch at his arm and stop him. Before I could
join them, some one from within had thrown open the
door. I saw Creegan and the first man dive into the
chill-aired, high-vaulted building, with its exotic odors
of spice and coffee and mysterious tropical bales. I

202 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

heard somebody call out to turn on the lights, and
then Creegan's disgustedly warning voice call back for
him to shut up. Then somewhere in the gloom inside
a further colloquy took place, a tangle of voices, a call
for quietness, followed by a sibilant hiss of caution.

Creegan appeared in the doorway again. I could
see that he was motioning for me.

"Come on," he whispered. And I tiptoed in after
him, under that echoing vaulted roof where the outline
of a wheeled gangway looked oddly like the skeleton
of some great dinosaur, and the pungent spicy odors
took me at one breath two thousand miles southward
into the Tropics.

"Take off those shoes," quietly commanded Creegan.
And I dropped beside him on the bare pier planks and
slipped my feet out of Shimmey's ungainly toed shoes.

A man moved aside from a door as we stepped
silently up to it. Creegan turned to whisper a word
or two in his ear. Then he opened the door and led
me by the sleeve into the utter darkness within, clos-
ing and locking the door after him.

I was startled by the sudden contact of Creegan's
groping fingers. I realized that he was thrusting a
short cylindrical object up against my body.

"Take this," he whispered.

"What is it?" I demanded in an answering whisper.

"It's a flashlight. Press here — see! And throw it
on when I say so!"

I took the flashlight, pressed as he told me, and saw
a feeble glow of light from its glass-globed end. About
this end he had swathed a cotton pocket handkerchief

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 203

More actual illumination would have come from a
tallow candle. But it seemed sufficient for Creegan's
purpose. I could see him peer about, step across to a
pile of stout wooden boxes, count them, test^one as to
its weight, squint once more searchingly about the
room, and then drop full length on the plank flooring
and press his ear to the wood.

He writhed and crawled about there, from one quar-
ter of the room to another, every minute or so pressing
an ear against the boards under him, for all the world
like a physician sounding a patient's lungs. He kept
returning, I noticed, to one area in the center of the
room, not more than a yard away from the pile of
wooden boxes. Then he leaned forward on his knees,
his hands supporting his body in a grotesque bear-like
posture. He continued to kneel there, intently watch-
ing the oak plank directly in front of him.

I saw one hand suddenly move forward and feel
along an inch or two of this plank, come to a stop, and
then suddenly raise and wave in the air. I did not
realize, at that moment, that the signal was for me.

"Put her out," he whispered. And as I lifted my
thumb from the contact point the room was again
plunged into utter darkness. Yet through that dark-
ness I could hear a distinct sound, a minute yet un-
mistakable noise of splintering wood, followed by an
even louder sound, as though an auger were being
withdrawn from a hole in the planking at my feet.

Then up from the floor on which Creegan knelt
a thin ray of light flickered and wavered and disap-
peared. A rumble of guarded voices crept to my ears,

204 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

and again I could detect that faint yet pregnant gnaw-
ing sound as the busy auger once more ate into the
oak planking on which we stood.

I suddenly felt Creegan's hand grope against my
knee. He rose to his feet beside me.

"It's all right," he whispered, with a calmness which
left me a little ashamed of my own excitement. "You
stay here until I come back."

I stood there listening to the slight noise of the door
as he opened it and closed it after him. I stood there
as I once more heard the telltale splintering of wood,
indicating that the auger had completed its second hole
through the planking. Then came the sound of its
withdrawal, and again the wavering pencil of light as
the men under the pier examined their work and
adjusted their auger-end for its next perforation.

A new anxiety began to weigh on me. I began to
wonder what could be keeping Creegan so long. I
grew terrified at the thought that he might be too late.
Vague contingencies on which I had failed to reckon
began to present themselves to me. I realized that
those three desperate men, once they saw I was again
coming between them and their ends, would be satis-
fied with no half measure.

Then occurred a movement which nearly brought
a cry from my startled lips. A hand, reaching slowly
out through the darkness, came in contact with my
knee, and clutched it. That contact, coming as it did
without warning, without reason, sent a horripilating
chill through all my body. The wonder was that I
did not kick out, like a frightened colt, or start to flail

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 205

about me with my flashlight. All I did, however, was
to twist and swing away. Yet before I could get to
my feet, the hand had clutched the side of my coat.
And as those clutching fingers held there, I heard a
voice whisper out of the darkness :

"Here, take this," and the moment I heard it I was
able to breathe again, for I knew it was Creegan.
"You may need it."

He was holding what I took to be a policeman's
night-stick up in front of me. I took it from him,
marveling how he could have re-entered that room
without my hearing him.

"There's a light-switch against the wall there, they
say," was his next whispered message to me. "Find
it. Keep back there and throw it on if I give the
word."

I felt and pawed and padded about the wall for
an uncertain moment or two. "Got it?" came Cree-
gan's whispering voice across the darkness.

"Yes," I whispered back.

He did not speak again, for a newer sound fell on
both his ears and mine. It was a sound of prodding
and prying, as though the men below were jimmying
at their loosened square of planking.

I leaned forward, listening, for I could hear the
squeak and grate of the shifting timber block. I did
not hear it actually fall away. But I was suddenly
conscious of a breath of cooler air in the room where I
stood and the persistent ripple of water against pile-
sides.

Then I heard a treble voice say, "A little higher.**

2o6 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

The speaker seemed so close that I felt I could have
stooped down and touched his body. I knew, even
before I saw the spurt of flame where he struck a match
along the floor, that the man was already half-way
up through the hole. I could see the dirt-covered,
claw-like hand as it held the match, nursing the tiny
flame, patiently waiting for it to grow. It was not
until this hand held the flaring match up before his
very face that Creegan moved.

That movement was as simple as it was unexpected.
I had no distinct vision of it, but I knew what it
meant. I knew, the moment I heard the dull and sick-
ening impact of seasoned wood against a human skull-
bone.

There was just one blow. But it was so well placed
that a second seemed unnecessary. Then, as far as
I could judge, Creegan took hold of the stunned man
and drew him bodily up through the hole in the floor.

A moment later a voice was saying, "Here, pull!"
And I knew that the second man was on his way up
into the room.

What prevented Creegan from repeating his ma-
neuver with the night-stick I could not tell. But I
knew the second attack was not the clean-cut job of
the first, for even as Creegan seized the body half-way
up through the opening, the struggle must have begun.

The consciousness that that struggle was not to be
promptly decided, that a third factor might at any
moment appear in the fight, stung me into the neces-
sity of some sort of blind action on my own part. I
remembered the first man, and that he would surely

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 207

be armed. I ran out toward the center of the room,
stumbled over the boxes of gold, and fell sprawling
along the floor. Without so much as getting on my
feet again I groped about until I found the prostrate
body. It took me only a moment to feel about that
limp mass, discover the revolver, and draw it from
its pocket. I was still on my knees when I heard
Creegan call out through the darkness.

'The light!" he gasped. "Turn on the light!"
I swung recklessly about at the note of alarm in his
voice and tried to grope my way toward him. Only
some last extremity could have wrung that call from
him. It was only too plain that his position was now
a perilous one. But what that peril was I could not
decipher.

"Where are you?" I gasped, feeling that wherever
he lay he needed help, that the quickest service I could
render him would be to reach his side.

"The light, you fool !" he cried out. "The light !"
I dodged and groped back to the wall where I felt
the light-switch to be. I had my fingers actually on the
switch when an arm like the arm of a derrick itself
swung about through the darkness, and at one stroke
knocked the breath out of my body and flattened me
against the wall. Before I could recover my breath,
a second movement spun me half around and lifted
me clear off my feet. By this time the great arm was
close about me, pinning my hands down to my side.

Before I could cry out or make an effort to escape,
the great hulk holding me had shifted his grip, bringing
me about directly in front of him and holding me there

208 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

with such a powerful grasp that it made breathing a
thing of torture. And as he held me there, he reached
out and turned on the light with his own hand. I
knew, even before I actually saw him, that it was the
third man.

I also knew, even before that light came on, what
his purpose was. He was holding me there as a
shield in front of him. This much I realized even
before I saw the revolver with which he was menacing
the enemy in front of him. What held my blinking
and bewildered eyes was the fact that Creegan him-
self, on the far side of the room, was holding the
struggling and twisting body of the man called Red-
ney in precisely the same position.

But what disheartened me was the discovery that
Creegan held nothing but a night-stick in his left hand.
All the strength of his right hand, I could see, was
needed to hold his man. And his revolver was still
in his pocket.

I had the presence of mind to remember my own
revolver. And my predicament made me desperate.
That gang had sown their dragon teeth, I decided,
and now they could reap their harvest.

I made a pretense of struggling away from my cap-
tor's clutch, but all the while I was working one elbow
back, farther and farther back, so that a hand could
be thrust into my coat pocket. I reached the pocket
without being noticed. My fingers closed about the
butt of the revolver. And still my purpose had not
been discovered.

As I lifted that firearm from my pocket I was no

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS 209

longer a reasoning human being. At the same time
I felt this red flash of rage through my body, I also
felt the clutch about my waist relax. The big man
behind me was ejaculating a single word. It was
"Creegan!"

Why that one shout should have the debilitating
effect on Creegan which it did, I had no means of
knowing. But I saw the sweat-stained and blood-
marked face of my colleague suddenly change. His
eyes stared stupidly, his jaw fell, and he stood there,
panting and open-mouthed, as though the last drop of
courage had been driven out of his body.

I felt that he was giving up, that he was surrender-
ing, even before I saw him let the man he had been
holding fall away from him. But I remembered the
revolver in my hand and the ignominies I had suffered.
And again I felt that wave of something stronger
than my own will, and I knew that my moment had
come.

I had the revolver at half -arm, with its muzzle in
against the body crushing mine, when Creegan's voice,
sharp and short as a bark, arrested that impending
finger-twitch.

"Stop!" he cried, and the horror of his voice puzzled
me.

"Why?" I demanded in a new and terrible calm.
But I did not lower my revolver.

"Stoo that!" he shouted, and his newer note, more

of anger than fear, bewildered me a bit.
"Why?"
But Creegan, as he caught at the coat collar of the

210 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

man called Redney, did not answer my repeated ques-
tion. Instead, he stared at the man beside me.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he finally murmured.

"What t' hell are you doin' here ?" cut in the big man
as he pushed my revolver-end away and dropped his
own gun into his pocket. "I've been trailin' these
guys for five weeks — and I want to know why you're
queerin' my job!"

Creegan, who had been feeling his front teeth be-
tween an investigatory thumb and forefinger, blinked
up at the big man. Then he turned angrily on me.

"Put down that gun!" he howled. He took a deep
breath. Then he laughed, mirthlessly, disgustedly.
"You can't shoot him!"

"Why can't I?"

"He's a stool pigeon ! A singed cat !"

"And what's a stool pigeon?" I demanded. "And
what's a singed cat?"

Creegan laughed for the second time as he wiped
his mouth with the back of his hand.

"He's a Headquarters gink who stays on the fence,
and tries to hunt with the hounds the same time he's
runnin' with the hares — and gener'ly goes round
queerin' an honest officer's work. And I guess he's
queered ours. So about the only thing for us to do,
's far as I can see, is for us to crawl off home and
go to bed!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER

IT WAS unquestionably a momentous night, that
night I discharged Latreille. I had felt the thing
coming, for weeks. But I had apparently been afraid
to face it. I had temporized and dallied along, dread-
ing the ordeal. Twice I had even bowed to tacit black-
mail, suavely disguised as mere advances of salary.
Almost daily, too, I had been subjected to vague in-
solences which were all the more humiliating because
they remained inarticulate and incontestable. And I
realized that the thing had to come to an end.

I saw that end when Benson reported to me that
Latreille had none too quietly entertained a friend
of his in my study, during my absence. I could have
forgiven the loss of the cigars, and the disappearance
of the cognac, but the foot-marks on my treasured old
San Domingoan mahogany console-table and the over-
turning of my Ch'ien-lung lapis bottle were things
which could not be overlooked.

I saw red, at that, and promptly and unquaveringly
sent for Latreille. And I think I rather surprised that
cool-eyed scoundrel, for I had grown to know life a
little better, of late. I had learned to stand less timor-
ous before its darker sides and its rougher seams. I
could show that designing chauffeur I was no longer
in his power by showing that I was no longer afraid
of him. And this latter I sought to demonstrate by

211

212 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

promptly and calmly and unequivocally announcing
that he was from that day and that hour discharged
from my service.

"You can't do it!'' he said, staring at me with sur-
prised yet none the less insolent eyes.

"I have done it," I explained. "You're discharged,
now. And the sooner you get out the better it will
suit me."

"And you're ready to take that risk ?" he demanded,
studying me from under his lowered brows.

"Any risks I care to assume in this existence of
mine," I coolly informed him, "are matters which
concern me alone. Turn your keys and service-clothes
and things in to Benson. And if there's one item
missing, you'll pay for it."

"How?" he demanded, with a sneer.

"By being put where you belong," I told him.

"And where's that?"

"Behind bars."

He laughed at this. But he stopped short as he
saw me go out to the door and fling it open. Then
he turned and faced me.

"I'll make things interesting for you!" he an-
nounced, slowly and pregnantly, and with an ugly for-
ward-thrust of his ugly pointed chin.

It was my turn to laugh.

"You Jkwc made them interesting," I acknowledged.
"But now they are getting monotonous."

"They won't stay that way," he averred.

I met his eye, without a wince. I could feel my
fighting blood getting hotter and hotter.

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 213

"You understand English, don't you?" I told him.
"You heard me say get out, didn't you?"

He stared at me, with that black scowl of his, for
a full half minute. Then he turned on his heel and
stalked out of the room.

I wasn't sorry to see him go, but I knew, as he
went, that he was carrying away with him something
precious. He was carrying away with him my peace
of mind for that whole blessed night.

Sleep, I knew, was out of the question. It would
be foolish even to attempt to court it. I felt the
familiar neurasthenic call for open spaces, the neces-
sity for physical freedom and fresh air. And it was
that, I suppose, which took me wandering off toward
the water-front, where I sat on a string-piece smoking
my seventh cigarette and thinking of Creegan and his
singed cat as I watched the light-spangled Hudson.

I had squatted there for a full half-hour, I think,
before I became even vaguely conscious of the other
presence so near me. I had no clear-cut memory of
that figure's advent. I had no impression of its move-
ment about my immediate neighborhood, I feel sure,
until my self-absorbed meditations were broken into
by the discovery that the stranger on the same wharf
where I loitered had quietly and deliberately risen
to an erect position. It startled me a little, in fact, to
find that he was standing at one end of the same string-
piece where I sat.

Then something about the figure brought a slow
perplexity into my mind, as I lounged there inhaling
the musky harbor-odors, under a sky that seemed

2i4 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Italian in its serenity, and a soft and silvery moon
that made the shuttling ferries into shadows scaled
with Roman gold. This perplexity grew into be-
wilderment, for as I studied the lean figure with its
loose-fitting paddock-coat flapping in the wharf-end
breeze I was reminded of something disturbing, of
something awesome. The gaunt form so voluminously
draped, the cadaverous face writh the startlingly sunken
cheeks, the touch of tragedy in the entire attitude,
brought sharply and suddenly to my mind the thought
of a shrouded and hollow-eyed symbol of Death, need-
ing only the scythe of honored tradition to translate
it into the finished picture.

He stood there for some time, without moving,
studying the wrater that ran like seamless black velvet
under the wharf-end. Then he slowly took off his
coat, folded it and placed it on the string-piece, and
on top of this again placed his hat. Then he laughed
audibly. I looked away, dreading that some spoken
triviality might spoil a picture so appealingly mys-
terious. When I next peered up at him he seemed
engaged in the absurd occupation of slowly turning
inside out the quite empty pockets of his clothing.
Then he once more looked down at the black water.

Those oily velvet eddies, apparently, were too much
for him. I saw him cover his face with his hands
and sway back with a tragically helpless mutter of
"I can't do it!" And both the gesture and the words
made my mind go back to the man from Medicine
Hat.

A thousand crawling little tendrils of curiosity over-

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 215

ran resentment at being thus disturbed in my quest
for solitude. I continued my overt watch of the in-
credibly thin stranger who was still peering down at
the slip-water. I was startled, a minute or two later,
to hear him emit a throat-chuckle that was as defiant
as it was disagreeable. Then with an oddly nervous
gesture of repudiation he caught up his hat and coat,
turned on his heel, and passed like a shadow down
the quietness of the deserted wharf.

I turned and followed him. The tragedy recorded
on that pallid face was above all pretense. He could
never be taken for a "dummy-chucker" ; the thing was
genuine. Any man who could squeeze life so dry that
he thought of tossing it away like an orange-skin was
worth following. He seemed a contradiction to every-
thing in the city that surrounded us, in that mad city
where every mortal appeared so intent on living, where
the forlornest wrecks clung so feverishly to life, and
where life itself, on that murmurous and moonlit
night, seemed so full of whispered promises.

I followed him back to the city, speculating, as idle
minds will, on who and what he was and by what
mischance he had been cast into this lowest pit of
indifferency. More things than his mere apparel as-
sured me he was not a "crust-thrower." I kept close
at his heels until we came to Broadway, startling
myself with the sudden wonder if he, too, were a
victim of those relentless hounds of wakefulness that
turn night into a never-ending inquisition.

Then all speculation suddenly ended, for I saw that
he had come to a stop and was gazing perplexedly up

216 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

and down the light-strewn channel of Broadway. I
noticed his eye waver on a passing figure or two,
whom he seemed about to accost. Then, as though
from that passing throng he beheld something kin-
dred and common in my face, he touched me lightly
on the arm.

I came to a stop, looking him full in the face.
There seemed almost a touch of the supernatural in
that encounter, as though two wondering ghosts stood
gazing at each other on the loneliest edges of a No-
man's Land.

He did not speak, as I was afraid he might, and
send a mallet of banality crashing down on that crystal
of wonderment. He merely waved one thin hand
toward the facade of a mirrored and pillared cara-
vansary wherein, I knew, it was the wont of the home-
less New Yorker to purchase a three-hour lease on
three feet of damask and thereby dream he was prob-
ing the innermost depths of life. His gesture, I saw,
was an invitation. It was also a challenge.

And both the invitation and the challenge I ac-
cepted, in silence, yet by a gesture which could not
be mistaken. It was in silence, too, that I followed
him in through the wide doorway and seated myself
opposite him at one of the rose-shaded parallelo-
grams of white linen that lay about us in lines as thick
and straight as tombstones in an abbey-floor.

I did not look at him, for a moment or two, dread-
ing as I did the approaching return to actuality. I
let my gaze wander about the riotous-colored room
into which the flood-tide of the after-theater crowds

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 217

was now eddying. It held nothing either new or
appealing to me. It was not the first time I had
witnessed the stars of stageland sitting in perigean
torpor through their seven-coursed suppers, just as it
was not the first time I had meekly endured the assault-
ing vulgarities of onyx pillars and pornographic art
for the sake of what I had found to be the most match-
less cooking in America.

It seemed an equally old story to my new friend
across the table, for as I turned away from the sur-
rounding flurry of bare shoulders, as white and soft
as a flurry of gull-wings, I saw that he had already
ordered a meal that was as mysteriously sumptuous
as it was startlingly expensive. He, too, was appar-
ently no stranger to Lobster Square.

I still saw no necessity for breaking the silence,
although he had begun to drink his wine with a febrile
recklessness rather amazing to me. Yet I felt that
with each breath of time the bubble of mystery was
growing bigger and bigger. The whole thing was
something more than the dare-devil adventure of a
man at the end of his tether. It was more than the
extravagance of sheer hopelessness. It was something
which made me turn for the second time and study
his face.

It was a remarkable enough face, remarkable for its
thinness, for its none too appealing pallor, and for a
certain tragic furtiveness which showed its owner to
be not altogether at peace with his own soul. About
his figure I had already detected a certain note of dis-
tinction, of nervous briskness, which at once lifted him

2i8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

above the place of the anemic street-adventurer. There
was something almost Heraclitean in the thin-lipped
and satyric mouth. The skin on the sunken cheeks
seemed as tight as the vellum across a snare-drum.
From the corner of his eyes, which were shadowed by
a smooth and pallid frontal-bone, radiated a network
of minutely small wrinkles. His hands, I could see,
were almost femininely white, as womanish in their
fragility as they were disquieting in their never-ending
restless movements. In actual years, I concluded, he
might have been anywhere between twenty-five and
thirty-five. He was at least younger than I first thought
him. Then I looked once more about the crowded room,
for I had no wish to make my inspection seem inquisi-
torial. He, too, let his eyes follow mine in their orbit
of exploration. Then, for the first time, he spoke.

"They'll suffer for this some day!" he suddenly de-
clared, with the vehemence of a Socialist confronted
by the voluptuosities of a Gomorrah. "They'll suffer
for it!"

"For what particular reason?" I inquired, follow-
ing his gaze about that quite unapprehensive roomful
of decorous revelers.

"Because one-half of them," he avowed, "are
harpies, and the other half are thieves!"

"Are you a New Yorker?" I mildly asked him. I
had been wondering if, under the circumstances, even
a voluminous paddock-coat would be reckoned as ade-
quate payment for a repast so princely. The man had
already proved to me that his pockets were empty.

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 219

"No, I'm not," he retorted. "I'm from God's
country."

That doubtlessly irreproachable yet vaguely denomi-
nated territory left me so much in doubt that I had
to ask for the second time the place of his origin.

"I come from Virginia," he answered, "and if I'd
stayed there I wouldn't be where I am to-night."

As this was an axiom which seemed to transcend
criticism I merely turned back to him and asked : "And
where are you to-night?"

He lifted his glass and emptied it. Then he leaned
forward across the table, staring me in the eyes as
he spoke. "Do you know the town of Hanover, down
in Virginia?"

I had to confess that I did not. As he sat looking
at me, with a shadow of disappointment on his lean
face, I again asked him to particularize his present
whereabouts.

"I'm on the last inch of the last rope-end," was his
answer.

"It seems to have its ameliorating condition," I re-
marked, glancing about the table.

He emitted a sharp cackle of a laugh.

"You'll have to leave me before I order the liqueur.
This," with a hand-sweep about the cluster of dishes,
"is some music I'll have to face alone. But what's
that, when you're on the last inch of the last rope-
end?"

"Your position," I ventured, "sounds almost like a
desperate one."

220 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Desperate !" he echoed. "It's more than that. It's
hopeless!"

"You have doubtless been visiting Wall Street or
possibly buying mining-stock?" was my flippant sug-
gestion. His manner of speech, I was beginning to feel,
was not markedly southern.

"No," he cried with quick solemnity. "I've been
selling it."

"But such activities, I assumed, were far removed
from the avenues of remorse."

He stared at me, absently, for a moment or two.
Then he moved restlessly in his chair.

"Did you ever hear of a wire-tapper?" he demanded.

"Quite often," I answered.

"Did you ever fall for one of their yarns? Did
you ever walk into one of their nice, gold-plated traps
and have them shake you down for everything you
owned — and even for things you didn't own?"

Here was a misfortune, I had to confess, which had
not yet knocked at my door.

"I came up to this town with thirty thousand dol-
lars, and not quite a third of it my own. Twenty of
it was for a marble quarry we were going to open up
on the Potomac. They sent me north to put through
the deal. It was new to me, all right. I wasn't used
to a town where they have to chain the door-mats
down and you daren't speak to your neighbor without
a police-permit. And when a prosperous-looking
traveler at my hotel got talking about horses and races
and the string that Keene sent south last winter, he
struck something that was pretty close to me, for that's

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 221

what we go in for down home — horse-breeding and
stock-farming. Then he told me how the assistant
superintendent of the Western Union, the man who
managed their racing department, was an old friend
of his. He also allowed this friend of his was ready
to phone him some early track-returns, for what he
called a big rakeoff. He even took me down to the
Western Union Building, on the corner of Dey and
Broadway, and introduced me to a man he called
the assistant superintendent. We met him in one
of the halls — he was in his shirt-sleeves, and looked
like a pretty busy man. He was to hold back the re-
turns until our bets could be laid. He explained that
he himself couldn't figure in the thing, but that his
sister-in-law might possibly handle the returns over
her own private wire."

"That sounds very familiar," I sadly commented.

"He seemed to lose interest when he found I had
only a few thousand dollars of my own. He said
the killing would be a quarter of a million, and the
risk for holding up the company's despatches would
be too great for him to bother with small bets. But
he said he'd try out the plan that afternoon. So my
traveler friend took me up to a pool-room with racing-
sheets and blackboards and half a dozen telegraph
keys and twice as many telephones. It looked like
the real thing to me. When the returns started to
come in and we got our flash, our private tip from the
Western Union office, I tried fifty dollars on a three-
to-one shot."

"And of course you won," was my sympathetic re-

222 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

joinder, as I sat listening to the old, sad tale. "You
always do."

"Then I met the woman I spoke about, the woman
who called herself the sister-in-law of the racine-wire

manager."

"And what was she like?" I inquired.

"She looked a good deal like any of these women
around here," he said with an eye-sweep over the
flurry of gull-wing backs and the garden of finery
that surrounded us. "She looked good enough to get
my thirty thousand and put me down and out."

At which he laughed his mirthless and mummy-like
laugh.

"You see, I had sense enough to get cold feet, over-
night. But when I talked it over with her next day,
and I saw her calling up a few of her Wall Street
friends, I kind of forgot my scruples. She got me
thinking crooked again. And that's all. That's where
the story ends."

His docility, as I sat thinking of that odious and
flamboyant type of she-harpy, began to irritate me.

"But why should it end here?" I demanded.

"Because I put twenty thousand dollars of other
people's money into a phony game, and lost it."

"Well, what of it?"

"Do you suppose I could go home with that hang-
ing over me?"

"Supposing you can't. Is that any reason why you
should lie down at this stage of the game?"

"But I've lost," he averred. "Everything's gone!"

" 'All is not lost,' " I quoted, feeling very much like

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 223

Francis the First after the Battle of Pavia, "'till
honor's self is gone !' "

"But even that's gone," was his listless retort. He
looked up, almost angrily, at my movement of impa-
tience. "Well, what would you do about it?" he chal-
lenged.

"I'd get that money back or I'd get that gang be-
hind the bars," was the answer I flung out at him.
"I'd fight them to a finish."

"But there's nothing to fight. There's nobody to
get hold of. That Western Union man was only a
capper, a come-on. Their poolroom's one of those
dirigible kind that move on when the police appear.
Then they'd claim I was as bad as they were, trying
to trick an honest bookmaker out of his money. And
besides, there's nothing left to show I ever handed
them over anything."

"Then I'd keep at it until I found something," I
declared. "How about the woman?'

"She'd be too clever to get caught. And I don't
suppose she'd know me from a piece of cheese."

"Do you suppose you could in any way get me in
touch with her?" I asked.

"But she's got police protection. I tried to have her
arrested myself. The officer told me to be on my way,
or he'd run me in."

"Then you know where she lives?" I quickly in-
quired.

He hesitated for a moment, as though my question
had caught him unawares. Then he mentioned one of
the smaller apartment-hotels of upper Broadway.

224 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"And what's her name?"

Again he hesitated before answering.

"Oh, she's got a dozen, I suppose. The only one
I know is Brunelle, Vinnie Branelle. That's the name
she answered to up there. But look here — you're not
going to try to see her, are you?"

"That I can't tell until to-morrow."

"I don't think there'll be any to-morrow, for me,"
he rejoined, as his earlier listless look returned to his
face. He even peered up a little startled, as I rose to
my feet.

"That's nonsense," was my answer. "We're going
to meet here to-morrow night to talk things over."

"But why?" he protested.

"Because it strikes me you've got a duty to perform,
a very serious duty. And if I can be of any service
to you it will be a very great pleasure to me. And in
the meantime, I might add that I am paying for this
little supper."

There is no activity more explosive than that of
the chronic'idler. Once out on Broadway, accordingly,
I did not let the grass grow under my feet. Two
minutes at the telephone and ten more in a taxicab
brought me in touch with my old friend Doyle who
was "working" a mulatto shooting case in lower
Seventh Avenue as quietly as a gardener working his
cabbage-patch.

"What do you know about a woman named Vinnie
Brunelle?" I demanded.

He studied the pavement. Then he shook his head.
The name clearly meant nothing to him.

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 225

"Give me something more to work on !"

"She's a young- woman who lives by her wits. She
keeps up a very good front, and now and then does a
variety of the wire-tapping game."

"I wonder if that wouldn't be the Cassal woman
Andrus used as a come-on for his Mexican mine
game? But she claimed Andrus had fooled her."

"And what else?" I inquired.

Doyle stood silent, wrapt in thought for a moment
or two.

"Oh, that's about all. I've heard she's an uncom-
monly clever woman, about the cleverest woman in the
world. But what are you after?"

"I want her record — all of it."

"That sort of woman never has a record. That's
what cleverness is, my boy, maintaining your reputa-
tion at the expense of your character."

"You've given birth to an epigram," I complained,
"but you haven't helped me out of my dilemma."
Whereupon he asked me for a card.

"I'm going to give you a line to Sherman — Camera-
Eye Sherman we used to call him down at Head-
quarters. He's with the Bankers' Association now, but
he was with our Identification Bureau so long he knows
'em all like his own family."

And on the bottom of my card I saw Doyle write :
"Please tell him what you can of Vinnie Brunelle."

"Of course I couldn't see him to-night?"

Doyle looked at his watch.

"Yes, you can. You'll get him up at his apart-
ment on Riverside. And I'll give you odds you'll

226 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

find the old night-owl playing bezique with his sister-
in-law !"

That, in fact, was precisely what I found the man
with the camera-eye doing. He sat there dealing out
the cards, at one o'clock in the morning, with a face
as mild and bland as a Venetian cardinal feeding his
pigeons.

My host looked at the card in his fingers, looked at
me, and then looked at the card again.

"She got you in trouble?" was his laconic query.

"I have never met the lady. But a friend of mine
has, I'm sorry to say. And I want to do what I can
to help him out."

"How much did he lose?"

"About thirty thousand dollars, he claims."

"What was the game ?"

"It appears to have been one of those so-called wire-
tapping coups."

"Funny how that always gets 'em!" ruminated that
verger of long-immured faces. "Well, here's what I
know about Vinnie. Seven or eight years ago she was
an artist's model. Then a sculptor called Delisle took
her over to Paris — she was still in her teens then. But
she was too brainy to stick to the studio-rat arrange-
ment. She soon came to the end of her rope there.
Then she came home — I've an idea she tried the stage
and couldn't make it go. Then she was a pearl-agent
in London. Then she played a variation of the 'lost-
heir' game in what was called the Southam case, work-
ing under an English confidence-man called Adams.
Then she got disgusted with Adams and came back to

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 227

America. She had to take what she could get, and for
a few weeks was a capper for a high-grade woman's
bucket-shop. When Headquarters closed up the shop
she went south and was in some way involved in the
Parra uprising in the eastern end of Cuba."

My apathetic chronicler paused for a moment or two,
studying his lacerated cigar-end.

"Then she married a Haytian half-cast Jew in the
Brazilian coffee business who'd bought a Spanish title.
Then she threw the title and the coffee-man over and
came back to Washington, where she worked the ropes
as a lobbyist for a winter or two. Then she took to
going to Europe every month or so. I won't say
she was a steamship gambler. I don't think she was.
But she made friends — and she could play a game of
bridge that'd bring your back hair up on end. Then
she worked with a mining share manipulator named
Andrus. She was wise enough to slip from under
before he was sent up the river. And since then
they tell me, she's been doing a more or less respectable
game or two with Coke Whelan, the wire-tapper. And
that, I guess, is about all."

"Has she ever been arrested that you know of?
Would they have her picture, for instance, down at
Headquarters ?"

The man who had grown old in the study of crime
smiled a little.

"You can't arrest a woman until you get evidence
against her."

"Yet you're positive she was involved in a number
of crooked enterprises?"

228 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"I never called her a crook," protested my host,
with an impersonality that suddenly became as Olym-
pian as it was exasperating. "No one ever proved to
me she was a crook."

"Well, I'm going to prove it. And I rather imagine
I'm going to have her arrested. Why," I demanded,
nettled by his satiric smile, "you don't mean to say
that a woman like that's immune?"

"No, I wouldn't say she was immune, exactly. On
the other hand, I guess she's helped our people in a
case or two, when it paid her."

"You mean she's really an informer, what they call
a welcher?"

"By no means. She's just clever, that's all. The
only time she ever turned on her own people was when
they threw her down, threw her flat. Then she did a
bit of secret service work for Wilkie's office in Wash-
ington that gave her more pull than all your Tam-
many 'politics' east of Broadway."

"Am I to understand that what you call politics and
pull, then, will let a woman rob a man of thirty thou-
sand dollars and go scot free?"

"My dear fellow, that type of woman never robs a
man. She doesn't need to. They just blink and hand
it over. Then they think of home and mother, about
ten hours after."

"But that doesn't sound quite reasonable," I con-
tended.

The older man looked solemnly at his cigar-end be-
fore asking his next question.

"Have you seen her yet?"

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 229

"No, I haven't," I replied as I rose to go. "But
I intend to."

He moved his heavy shoulder in a quick half-circular
forward thrust. It might have meant anything. But
I did not linger to find out. I was too impressed with
the need of prompt and personal action on my part to
care much for the advice of outsiders.

But as each wakeful hour went by I found myself
possessed of an ever widening curiosity to see this odd
and interesting woman who, as Doyle expressed it,
had retained reputation at the expense of character.

It was extremely early the next morning that I pre-
sented myself at Vinnie Brunelle's apartment-hotel. I
had not only slept badly ; I had also dreamed of myself
as a flagellant monk sent across scorching sands to
beg a barbaric and green-eyed Thais to desist from
tapping telegraph-wires leading into the camp of Alex-
ander the Great

The absurdity of that opianic nightmare seemed to
project itself into my actual movements of the morn-
ing. The exacting white light of day withered the
last tendril of romance from my quixotic crusade. It
was only by assuring myself, not so much that I was
espousing the cause of the fallen, but that I was about
to meet a type of woman quite new to my experience,
that I was able to face Miss Brunelle's unbetrayingly
sober door.

This door was duly answered by a maid, by a sur-
prisingly decorous maid in white cap and apron. I
was conscious of her veiled yet inquisitorial eye rest-
ing on my abashed person for the smallest fraction of

230 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

a second. I almost suspected that in that eye might
be detected a trace of something strangely like con-
tempt. But, a little to my astonishment, I was admitted
quite without question.

"Miss Brunelle is just back from her morning ride
in the park," this maid explained.

I entered what was plainly a dining-room, a small but
well-lighted chamber. Striped awnings still kept the
tempered autumn sun from the opened windows, where
a double row of scarlet geranium-tops stood nodding
in the breeze. At one end of the table in the center
of the room sat a woman, eating her breakfast.

She was younger looking, much younger looking,
than I had thought she would be. Had she not sat
there already inundated by the corroding acids of an
earlier prejudice, I would even have admitted that she
was an extremely beautiful woman.

She was in a rose-colored dressing-gown which
showed a satin-like smoothness of skin at the throat
and arms. Her eyes, I could see, were something
between a hazel and a green, set wide apart under a
Pallas Athena brow, that might have been called se-
rene, but for some spirit of rebellion vaguely refracted
from the lower part of the face. The vividness of
her color, which even the flaming sweep of her gown
could not altogether discount, made me think of ma-
terial buoyancies, of living flesh and blood and a body
freshly bathed.

Her gaze was direct, disconcertingly direct. It even
made me question whether or not she was reading
my thought as I noted that her hands were large and

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 231

white, that her mouth, for all its brooding discontent,
was not without humor, and, strangely enough, that
her fingers, ears, and throat were without a touch
of that jewelry which I had thought peculiar to her
kind

That she possessed some vague yet menacing gift
of intimacy I could only too plainly feel, not so much
from the undisturbed ease of her pose and the negli-
gently open throat and arms as from the direct gaze
of those searching and limpid eyes, which proclaimed
that few of the poppied illusions of life could flower
in their neighborhood. This discomforting sense of
mental clarity, in fact, forced me into the conscious-
ness not so much of being in the presence of a soft
and luxurious body as of standing face to face with
a spirit that in its incongruous way was as austere
as it was alert.

"You wish to see me?" she said, over her coffee-
cup. My second glance showed me that she was
eating a breakfast of iced grape-fruit and chops and
scrambled eggs and buttered toast.

"Very much," I answered.

"About what?" she inquired, breaking a square of
toast.

"About the unfortunate position of a young gentle-
man who has just parted company with thirty thousand
dollars r

She bent her head, with its loose and heavy coils
of dark hair, and glanced at my card before she
spoke again.

"And what could I possibly do for him?"

232 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

There was something neither soothing nor encourag-
ing in her unruffled calmness. But I did not intend
to be disarmed by any theatrical parade of tranquillity.

"You might," I suggested, "return the thirty thou-
sand."

There was more languor than active challenge in
her glance as she turned and looked at me.

"And I don't think I even know who you are," she
murmured.

"But I happen to know just who you are," was my
prompt and none too gentle rejoinder.

She pushed back her hair — it seemed very thick
and heavy — and laughed a little.

"Who am I?" she asked, licking the toast-crumbs
from her white finger-tips.

"I'll tell you who you are," I retorted with some
heat. "You're a figure-model that a sculptor named
Delisle took to Paris. You're the old running-mate
of Adams in the Southam heir case. You're the wife
of a Haytian half-caste Jew with a Spanish title.
You're the woman who worked with Andrus, the wild-
cat mine-swindler who is now doing time in Sing Sing.
And just at present you're the accomplice of a gang
headed by a certain Coke Whelan, a wire-tapper well
known to the police."

Her face showed no anger and no resentment as I
unburdened myself of this unsavory pedigree. Her
studious eyes, in fact, became almost contemplative.

"And supposing that's all true?" she finally asked.
"What of it?"

She sat and looked at me, as cool as a cucumber.

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 233

I could no longer deny that as a type she interested
me. Her untamed audacities were something new to
my experience. She seemed still in the feral state.
Her mere presence, as she sat there in the lucid morn-
ing light, exerted over me that same spell which keeps
children rooted before a circus-animal's cage.

"What of it?" she quietly repeated.

"I'm afraid there's nothing of it," I admitted, "ex-
cept in the one point where it impinges on my personal
interests. I intend to get that thirty thousand dollars
back."

The resolution of my tone seemed only to amuse
her.

"But why come to me?" she asked, turning back
to her breakfast. "Supposing I really was a cog in
some such machinery as you speak of, how much would
be left on one small cog when so many wheels had to
be oiled ?"

"I have no great interest in your gang and its
methods. All I know is a tremendous wrong's been
done, and I want to see it righted."

"From what motive?" she asked, with that bar-
baric immediacy of approach peculiar to her.

"From the most disinterested of motives — I mean
from the standpoint of that rather uncommon thing
known as common honesty."

She looked at me, long and intently, before she spoke
again. I had the feeling of being taken up and turned
over and inspected through a lense of implacable clarity.

"Do you know this young man who lost his money
on what he took for a fixed race?"

234 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"I have met him," I answered, a little discomfited
at the recollection of how tenuous that acquaintance-
ship was.

"And have you known him long?"

I was compelled to confess to the contrary.

"And you understand the case, through and
through ?"

"I think I do," was my curt retort.

She turned on me quickly, as though about to break
into an answering flash of anger. But on second
thoughts she remained silent.

"If life were only as simple as you sentimental char-
ity-workers try to make it!" she complained, studying
me with a pitying look which I began most keenly to
resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt.
"If all those hay-tossers who come to this town and
have their money taken away from them were only
as lamb-like as you people imagine they are !"

"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?"
I inquired. For the first time I saw a touch of deeper
color mark her cheek. I had been conscious of a cer-
tain duality in her mental equipment, just as I could
detect a higher and lower plane in her manner of
speech.

"Not at all," she retorted. "I'm not talking of theft.
And we may as well keep to cases. I don't think very
much is ever gained by being impolite, do you ?"

I was compelled to agree with her, though I could
not shake off the feeling that she had in some dim way
scored against me. And this was the woman I had
once feared would try to toy with my coat-buttons.

THE DUMjMY-CHUCKER 235

"I'm afraid," she went on with her grave abstraction
of tone, "that you'll find me very matter-of-fact. A
woman can't see as much of the world as I have and
then — oh ! and then beat it back to the Elsie Books."

I resented the drop to the lower plane, as though she
had concluded the upper one to be incomprehensible to
me.

"Pardon me, madam ; it's not my windmills I'm try-
ing to be true to ; it's one of my promises."

"The promise was a very foolish one," she mildly
protested. "Yet for all that," she added, as an after-
thought, "you're intelligent. And I like intelligence."

Still again her deep and searching eyes rested on my
face. Her next words seemed more a soliloquy than a
speech.

"Yet you are doing this just to be true to your wind-
mills. You're doing it out of nothing more than blind
and quixotic generosity."

The fact that my allusion had not been lost on her
pleased me a little more, I think, than did her stare
of perplexed commiseration.

"Isn't is odd," she said, "how we go wrong about
things, how we jump at conclusions and misjudge peo-
ple ? You think, at this very moment, that I'm the one
who sees crooked, that I'm the one who's lost my per-
spective on things. And now I'm going to do some-
thing I hadn't the remotest intention of doing when
you came into this room."

"And what is that ?"

"I'm going to show you how wrong you've been,
how wrong you are."

236 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"In what?" I inquired as she again sat in silence
before me.

"In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to
her feet. I was at once more conscious of her physical
appeal, of her inalienable bodily buoyancy, as I saw
her standing there at her full height. The deep flow
of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almost
pontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did.
And I could see by her eyes that the courtesy was
neither negligible nor distasteful to her. She was about
to say something; then she stopped and looked at me
for a hesitating moment or two.

One would have thought, from the solemnity of that
stare, that she faced the very Rubicon of her life. But
a moment later she laughed aloud, and with a multi-
tudinous rustling of skirts crossed the room and opened
an inner door.

Through this door, for a moment or two, she com-
pletely left my sight. Then she returned, holding a
cabinet photograph in her hand.

"Do you know it?" she quietly asked as she passed
it over to me.

It took but a glance to show me that it was a picture
of the man whose cause I was at that moment espous-
ing, the man I had followed from the North River
pier-end the night before. A second glance showed me
that the photograph had been taken in London ; it bore
the stamped inscription : "Garet Childs, Regent's Park,
N. W."

The woman's sustained attitude of anticipation, of

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 237

expectation unfulfilled, puzzled me. I saw nothing re-
markable about the picture or her possession of it.

"This, I believe, is the man you're trying to save
from the clutches of a wire-tapper named Whelan,
Coke Whelan, as you call him?"

I acknowledged that it was.

"Now look at the signature written across it," she
prompted

I did as she suggested. Inscribed there I read:
"Sincerely and more, Duncan Cory Whelan."

"Have I now made the situation comparatively clear
to you ?" she asked, watching my face as I looked from
her to the photograph and then back to her again.

"I must confess, I don't quite grasp it," I admitted,
thinking at the moment how her face in the strong
side-light from the windows had taken on a quite acci-
dental touch of pathos.

"It's simply that the man you are trying to save
from Coke Whelan is Coke Whelan himself. "

"That's impossible !" was my exclamation.

"It's not impossible," she said a little wearily, "be-
cause the whole thing's nothing more than a plant, a
frame-up. And you may as well know it. It can't
go on. The whole thing was a plan to trap you."

"A plan to trap me ?"

"Yes, a carefully worked-out plan to gather you in.
And now, you see, the machinery is slipping a cog
where it wasn't expected to !"

I stood there incredulous, dazed, trying to digest the
shock.

238 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"You mean that the man I met and talked to last
night is actually an accomplice of yours?"

"Yes," she answered, "if you care to put it that
way."

"But I can't believe it. I won't believe it until you
bring him here and prove it."

She sank into her chair, with a half-listless motion
for me to be seated.

"Do you know why he's called Coke Whelan ?" she
demanded.

I did not.

"That, too, you've got to know. It's because he's
a heroin and cocaine fiend. He's killing himself with
the use of drugs. He's making everything impossible.
It's left him irresponsible, as dangerous as any lunatic
would be at large."

She turned and looked at a tiny jeweled watch.

"He will be here himself by ten o'clock. And if he
heard me saving what I am at this moment, he would
kill me as calmly as he'd sit at a cafe table and lie to
you."

"But what's the good of those lies ?"

"Don't you suppose he knew you were Witter Ker-
foot, that among other things you owned a house, and
a car, that you were worth making a try for ? Don't
you suppose he found all that out before he laid his
ropes for this wire-tapping story? Can't you see the
part J was to play, to follow his lead and show you
how we could never bring his money back, but that
we could face the gang with their own fire. I was
to weaken and show you how we could tap the tapper's

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 239

own wire, choose the race that promised the best odds,
and induce you to plunge against the house on what
seemed a sure thing?"

I sat there doing my best to Fletcherize what seemed
a remarkably big bite of information.

"But why are you telling me all this?" I still par-
ried, pushing back from the flattering consciousness
that we had a secret in common, that I had proved
worthy an intimacy denied others.

"Because I've just decided it's the easiest way Out."

"For whom?"

"Forme!"

"What made you decide that?"

"I've done a lot of thinking since you came into this
room. And for a long time I've been doing a lot of
thinking. I don't do things Coke Whelan's way. I
took pity on him, once. But I'm getting tired of trying
to keep him up when he insists on dropping lower,
lower and lower every day. Don't imagine, because
you've got certain ideas of me and my life, that I
haven't common sense, that I can't see what this other
sort of thing leads to. I've seen too many of them, and
how they all ended. I may have been mixed up with
some strange company in my day, but I want you to
know that I've kept my hands clean!"

She had risen by this time and was moving rest-
lessly about the room.

"Do you suppose I'd ever be satisfied to be one of
those painted Broadway dolls and let my brain dry up
like a lemon on a pantry shelf? I couldn't if I wanted
to. I couldn't, although I can see how easy it makes

240 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

everything. I tell you, a woman with a reputation like
mine has got to pay, and keep on paying. She's got
to pay twice over for the decencies of life. She's got
to pay twice over for protection. Unless you're re-
spectable you can't have respectable people about you.
You've got to watch every one in your circle, watch
them always, like a hawk. You've got to watch every
step you take, and every man you meet — and sometimes
you get tired of it all."

She sat down, in the midst of her febrile torrent of
words, and looked at me out of clouded and questioning
eyes. I knew, as I met that troubled gaze, so touched
with weariness and rebellion, that she was speaking
the truth. I could see truth written on her face. I
tried to imagine myself in her place, I tried to see
life as she had seen it during those past years, which
no charity could translate into anything approaching
the beautiful. And much as I might have wished it,
I could utter no emptiest phrase of consolation. Our
worlds seemed too hopelessly wide apart for any com-
mon view-point.

"What are you going to do ?" I asked, humiliated by
the inadequacy of the question even as I uttered it.

"I'm going to get away from it. I'm going to get
away where I can breathe in peace. Oh, believe me,
I can be irreproachable without even an effort. I want
to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier it
makes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's
that one drug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing
who knows that if I step away from him he daren't
round a street-corner without being arrested."

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 241

She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her
face. Then I saw her slowly rise to her feet and look
undecidedly about the four corners of the room. Then
she turned to me. Her eyes seemed ridiculously terri-
fied.

"He's come!" she said, in little more than a whisper.

"He's here now!"

The door opened before I could speak. But even
before the mummy- faced man I had left at the cafe
table the night before could stride into the room, the
woman in front of me sank back into her chair. Over
her face came a change, a veil, a quickly coerced and
smiling-lipped blankness that reminded me of a pas-
toral stage-drop shutting out some grim and moving
tragedy.

The change in the bearing and attitude of the in-
truder was equally prompt as his startled eyes fell
on me calmly seated within those four walls. He was
not as quick as the woman in catching his cue.

I could plainly detect the interrogative look he
flashed at her, the look which demanded as plain as
words : "What is this man doing here ?"

"This," said the woman at the table, in her most
dulcet and equable tones, "is the altruistic gentleman
who objects to your losing thirty thousand dollars in
a race which I had no earthly way of controlling."

Here, I saw, was histrionism without a flaw. Her
fellow-actor, I could also see, was taking more time
to adjust himself to his role. He was less finished in
his assumption of accusatory indignation. But he did
his best to rise to the occasion.

242 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"I've got to get that money back," he cried, leveling
a shaking finger at her. "And I'm going to do it with-
out dragging my friends into it !"

She walked over to the windows and closed them
before she spoke.

"What's the use of going over all that?" she con-
tinued, and I had the impression of sitting before a
row of foot-lights and watching an acted drama. "You
took your risk and lost. I didn't get it. It's not my
fault. You know as well as I do that McGowan and
Noyes will never open up unless you're in a position
to make them. It's a case of dog eat dog, of fighting
fire with fire. And I've just been telling it all to your
friend Mr. Kerfoot, who seems to think he's going to
have some one arrested if we don't suddenly do the
right thing."

"I want my money !" cried the man named Whelan.
I could see, even as he delivered his lines, that his mind
was floundering and groping wildly about for solid
ground.

"And Mr. Kerfoot," continued the tranquil-voiced
woman at the table, "says he has a house in Gramercy
Square where we can go and have a conference. I've
phoned for a telegraph operator called Downey to be
there, so we can decide on a plan for tapping Mc-
Gowan's wire."

"And what good does that do me?" demanded the
mummy-faced youth.

"Why, that gives Mr. Kerfoot his chance to bet as
much as he likes, to get as much back from McGowan
as he wants to, without any risk of losing."

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 243

"But who handles the money?" demanded the wary
Whelan.

''That's quite immaterial. You can, if you're his
friend, or he can handle it himself. The important
thing is to get your plan settled and your wire tapped.
\nd if Mr. Kerfoot will be so good as to telephone to
his butler I'll dress and be ready in ten minutes."

She leaned forward and swung an equipoise phone-
bracket round to my elbow.

But I did not lift the receiver from its hook. For
at that moment the door abruptly opened. The maid
in the white cap and apron stood trembling on its
threshold.

"That's a lie!" she was crying, in her shrill and
sudden abandon, and the twin badges of servitude
made doubly incongruous her attitude of fierce revolt.
"It's a lie, Tony! She's welched on you!"

She took three quick steps into the room.

"She's only playing you against this guy. I've heard
every word of it. She never phoned for an operator.
That's a lie. She's throwing you down, for good.
She's told him who you are and what your game is!"

I looked at the other woman. She was now on her
feet.

"Don't let her fool you this time, Tony," was the
passionate cry from the quivering breast under the in-
congruous white apron-straps. "Look at how she's
treated you ! Look at your picture there, that she
cinched her talk with ! She never did half what I did
for you ! And now you're letting her throw you flat !
You're standing there and letting — "

244 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

The woman stopped, and put her hands over her
ears. For she saw, even as I did, the hollow-eyed,
mummy-faced youth reach a shaking hand back to his
hip.

"You liar !" he said, as his hand swung up with the
revolver in it. "You lying welcher!" he cried, in a
thin and throaty voice that was little more than a
cackle.

He took one step toward the woman in the rose-
colored dressing-gown. She was, I could see, much
the taller of the two. And she was standing, now,
with her back flat against the wall. She made no
attempt to escape. She was still staring at him out
of wide and bewildered eyes when he fired.

I saw the spit of the plaster and the little shower
of mortar that rained on her bare shoulder from the
bullet-hole in the wall.

Then I did a very ordinary and commonplace thing.
I stooped quickly forward to the end of the table and
caught up the nickeled coffee-pot by its ebony handle.
The lunatic with the smoking revolver saw my sudden
movement, for as I swung the metal instrument up-
ward he turned on me and fired for the second time.

I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my
up-thrust wrist. I knew then that it was useless to
try to reach him. I simply brought my arm forward
and let the metal pot fly from my hand. I let it fly
forward, targeting on his white and distorted face.

Where or how it struck I could not tell. All I
knew was that he went down under a scattering geyser
of black coffee. He did not Are again. He did not

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER 245

even move. But as he fell the woman in the cap and
apron dropped on her knees beside him. She knelt
there with an inarticulate cry like that of an animal
over its fallen mate, a ludicrous, mouse-like sound that
was almost a squeak. Then she suddenly edged about
and reached out for the fallen revolver.

I saw her through the smoke, but she had the gun
in her hand before I could stop her. She fought over
it like a wildcat. The peril of that combat made me
desperate. Her arm was quite thin, and not overly
strong. I first twisted it so the gun-barrel pointed out-
ward. The pain, as I continued to twist, must have
been intense. But I knew it was no time for half-
measures. Just how intense that pain was came home
to me a moment later, when the woman fell forward
on her face, in a dead faint.

The other woman had calmly thrown open the win-
dows. She watched me, almost apathetically, as I got
to my feet and stooped in alarm over the unconscious
man in his ridiculous welter of black coffee. Then
she stepped closer to me.

"Have you killed him?" she asked, with more a
touch of childlike wonder than any actual fear.

"No; he's only stunned."

"But how?"

"It caught him here on the forehead. He'll be
around in a minute or two."

Once more I could hear the multitudinous rustle as
she crossed the room.

"Put him here on my bed," she called from an open
door. And as I carried him in and dropped him in

246 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

a sodden heap on the white coverlet, I saw the woman
unsheathe her writhing body of its rose-colored wrap-
ping. From that flurry of warmth her twisting body
emerged almost sepulchrally white. Then she came
to a pause, bare-shouldered and thoughtful before me.

"Wait !" she said as she crossed the room. "I must
telephone McCausland."

"Who's McCausland?" I asked as she stepped out
into the dining-room.

"He's a man I know at Headquarters," was her
impersonal-noted reply.

For the second time, as she stepped hurriedly back
into the room with me, I was conscious of the satin-
like smoothness of her skin, the baby-like whiteness of
her rounded bare arms. Then wholly unabashed by
my presence, she flung open a closet door and tossed a
cascade of perfumed apparel out beside the bed where
I stood.

"What are you going to do?" I demanded, as I saw
her white-clad figure writhe itself into a street dress.
There was something primordial and Adamitic in the
very calmness with which she swept through the flimsy
reservations of sex. She was as unconscious of my
predicament as a cave woman might have been. And
the next moment she was crushing lingerie and narrow-
toed shoes and toilet articles and undecipherable gar-
ments of folded silk into an English club-bag. Then
she turned to glance at her watch on the dresser.

"I'm going!" she said at last, as she caught up a
second hand-bag of alligator skin and crammed into it
jewel boxes of dark plush and cases of different col-

THE DUMMY-CHUCKER

ored kid, and still more clothing and lingerie. "I'm
going to catch the Nieuw Amsterdam"
' "For where?"

"For Europe!"

Her quick and dextrous hands had pinned on a hat
and veil as I stood in wonder watching her.

"Call a taxi, please," she said, as she struggled into
her coat. "And a boy for my bags."

I was still at the receiver when she came into the
room and looked down for a moment at the woman
moaning and whimpering on the coffee-stained floor.
Then she began resolutely and calmly drawing on her
gloves.

"Couldn't we do something for them?" I said as I
stepped back into the bedroom for her hand-bag.

"What?" she demanded, as she leaned over the bed
where Whelan's reviving body twitched and moved.

"There must be something."

"There's nothing. Oh, believe me, you can't help
him. I can't help him. He's got his own way to go.
And it's a terribly short way !"

She flung open a bureau drawer and crammed a
further article or two down in her still open chatelaine
bag.

Then she opened the outer door for the boy who
had come for the bags. Then she looked at her watch
again.

"You must not come back," she said to me. "They
may be here any time."

"Who may?" I asked.

"The police," she answered as she closed the door.

248 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

She did not speak again until we were at the side of
the taxicab.

"To the Holland American Wharf," she said.

Nor did she speak all the while we purred and
hummed and dodged our way across the city. She
did not move until we jolted aboard the ferry-boat, and
the clanging of the landing-float's pawl-and-rachet told
us we were no longer on that shrill and narrow island
where the fever of life burns to the edge of its three
laving rivers. It was then and only then that I no-
ticed the convulsive shaking of her shoulders.

"What is it?" I asked, helplessly, oppressed by the
worlds that seemed to stand between us.

"It's nothing," she said, with her teeth against her
lip. But the next minute she was crying as forlornly
and openly as a child.

"What is it?" I repeated, as inadequately as before,
knowing the uselessness of any debilitating touch of
sympathy.

"It's so hard," she said, struggling to control her
voice.

"What is?"

"It's so hard to begin over."

"But they say you're the cleverest woman in the
world !" was the only consolation I could offer her.

CHAPTER IX

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM

I LIFTED my face to the sudden pelt of the rain-
shower, feeling- very much like a second edition of
King- Lear as I did so. Not that I had lost a kingdom,
or that I'd ever been turned out of an ungrateful home
circle! But something quite as disturbing, in its own
small way, had overtaken me.

I had been snubbed by Mary Lockwood. While I
stood watching that sudden shower empty upper
Broadway as quickly as a fusillade of bullets might
have emptied it, I encountered something which quite
as promptly emptied my own heart. It was the cut
direct. For as I crouched back under my dripping
portico, like a toad under a rhubarb-leaf, I caught
sight of the only too familiar wine-colored landaulet
as it swung about into Longacre Square. I must have
started forward a little, without being quite con-
scious of the movement. And through the sheltering
plate-glass of the dripping hood I caught sight of
Mary Lockwood herself.

She saw me, at the same time that I saw her. In
fact, she turned and stared at me. I couldn't have
escaped her, as I stood there under the street-lamp.
But no slightest sign of recognition came from that
coldly inquiring face. She neither smiled nor bowed
nor looked back. And the wine-colored landaulet swept

249

250 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

on, leaving me standing there with my sodden hat in
my hand and a great ache of desolation in my heart.

She must have seen me, I repeated as I turned dis-
consolately back and stood watching men and women
still ducking under doorways and dodging into side-
streets and elbowing into theater-lobbies. It seemed
during the next few moments as though that terri-
tory once known as the Rialto were a gopher-village
and some lupine hunger had invaded it. Before the
searching nuzzles of those rain-guests all pleasure-
seekers promptly vanished. Gaily cloaked and slip-
pered women stampeded away as though they were
made of sugar and they and their gracious curves
might melt into nothing at the first touch of water.
Above the sidewalk, twenty paces from the empty door-
way where I loitered, an awning appeared, springing
up like a mushroom from a wet meadow. In toward
one end of this awning circled a chain of limousines
and taxicabs, controlled by an impassive Hercules in
dripping oil-skins. And as a carrier-belt empties grain
into a mill-bin, so this unbroken chain ejected hurry-
ing men and women across the wet curb into the light-
spangled hopper of the theater-foyer. And the thought
of that theater, with its companionable crush of hu-
manity, began to appeal to my rain-swept spirit.

Yet I stood there, undecided, watching the last of
the scattering crowd, watching the street that still
seemed an elongated bull-ring where a matador or
two still dodged the taurine charges of vehicles. I
watched the electric display-signs that ran like liquid
ivy about the shop fronts, and then climbed and flut-

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 251

tered above the roofs, misty and softened by rain. I
watched the ironic heavens pour their unabating floods
down on that congested and overripe core of a city
that no water could wash clean.

Then the desolation of the empty streets seemed to
grow unbearable. The spray that blew in across my
dampened knees made me think of shelter. I saw the
lights of the theater no more than twenty paces away.
It was already a warren of crowded life. The thought
of even what diluted companionship it might offer me
continued to carry an appeal that became more and
more clamorous.

A moment later I stood before its box-office window,
no wider than a medieval leper-squint, from which
cramped and hungry souls buy access to their modern
temples of wTonder. '

"Standing room only," announced the autocrat of
the wicket. And I meekly purchased my admission-
ticket, remembering that the head usher of that par-
ticular theater had in the past done me more than one
slight service.

Yet the face of this haughtily obsequious head
usher, as his hand met mine in that free-masonry
which # is perpetuated by certain silk- threaded scraps of
oblong paper, was troubled.

"I haven't a thing left," he whispered.

I peered disconsolately about that sea of heads seek-
ing life through the clumsy lattice of polite melodrama.

"Unless," added the usher at my elbow, "you'll take
a seat in that second lower box?"

Even through the baize doors behind me I could

252 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

hear the beat and patter of the rain. It was a case of
any port in a storm.

"That will do nicely," I told him and a moment
later he was leading me down a side aisle into the cur-
tained recess of the box entrance.

Yet it was not ordained that I should occupy that
box in lonely and unrivaled splendor. One of its
chairs, set close to the brass rail and plush-covered
parapet that barred it off from the more protuberant
stage box, was already occupied by a man in full
evening dress. He, like myself, perhaps, had never
before shared a box with other than his own acquaint-
ances. At any rate, before favoring me with the some-
what limited breadth of his back, he turned on me
one sidelong and unmistakably resentful stare.

Yet I looked at this neighbor of mine, as I seated
myself, with more interest than I looked at the play-
actors across the foot-lights, for I rather preferred life
in the raw to life in the sirups of stage emotionalism.

It startled me a little to find that the man, at the
moment, was equally oblivious of anything taking
place on the stage. His eyes, in fact, seemed fixed on
the snowy shoulders of the woman who sat at the back
of the stage box, directly in front of him. As I fol-
lowed the direction of his gaze I was further surprised
to discover the object on which it was focused. He
was staring, not at the woman herself, but at a pigeon-
blood ruby set in the clasp of some pendant or neck-
lace encircling her throat.

There was, indeed, some excuse for his staring at it.
In the first place it was an extraordinarily large and

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 253

vivid stone. But against the background where it lay,
against the snow-white column of the neck (whitened,
perhaps, by a prudent application of rice powder) it
stood out in limpid ruddiness, the most vivid of fire
against the purest of snow. It was a challenge to
attention. It caught and held the eye. It stood there,
just below where the hair billowed into its crown of
Venetian gold, as semaphoric as a yard-lamp to a night
traveler. And I wondered, as I sat looking at it, what
element beyond curiosity could coerce the man at my
side into studying it so indolently and yet so intently.

About the man himself there seemed little that was
exceptional. Beyond a certain quick and shrewd alert-
ness in his eye-movements as he looked about at me
from time to time with muffled resentment which I
found not at all to my liking, he seemed medium in
everything, in coloring, in stature, in apparel. His
face was of the neutral sallowness of the sedentary
New Yorker. His intelligence seemed that of the
preoccupied office-worker who could worm his way
into an ill-fitting dress suit and placidly approve of sec-
ond-rate melodrama. He seemed so without interest,
in fact, that I was not averse to directing my glance
once more toward the pigeon-blood ruby which glowed
like a live coal against the marble whiteness of the
neck in front of me.

It may have been mere accident, or it may have been
that out of our united gaze arose some vague psychic
force which disturbed this young woman. For as I sat
there staring at the shimmering jewel, its wearer sud-
denly turned her head and glanced back at me. The

254 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

next moment I was conscious of her nod and smile, un-
mistakably in my direction.

Then I saw who it was. I had been uncouthly star-
ing at the shoulder-blades of Alice Churchill — they
were the Park Avenue Churchills — and farther back
in the box I caught a glimpse of her brother Benny,
who had come north, I knew, from the Nicaraguan
coast to recuperate from an attack of fever.

Yet I gave little thought to either of them, I must
confess. At the same time that I had seen that mo-
mentarily flashing smile I had also discovered that the
jeweled clasp on the girl's neck was holding in place
a single string of graduated pearls, of very lovely
pearls, the kind about which the frayed-cuff garret-
author and the Sunday "yellows" forever love to ro-
mance. I was also not unconscious of the quick and
covert glance of the man who sat so close to me.

Then I let my glance wander back to the ruby, appar-
ently content to study its perfect cutting and its un-
matchable coloring. And I knew that the man beside
me was also sharing in that spectacle. I was, in fact,
still staring at it, so unconscious of the movement of
the play on the stage that the "dark scene," when
every light in the house went out for a second or two,
came to me with a distinct sense of shock.

A murmur of approval went through the house as
the returning light revealed to them a completely meta-
morphosed stage-setting. What this setting was I did
not know, nor did I look up to see. For as my idly
inquisitive glance once more focused itself on the col-
umnar white neck that towered above the chair-back

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 255

a second and greater shock came to me. Had that
neck stood there without a head I could have been
scarcely more startled.

The pigeon-blood ruby was gone. There was no
longer any necklace there. The column of snow was
without its touch of ruddy light. It was left as dis-
turbingly bare as a target without its bull's-eye. It
reminded me of a marble grate without its central
point of fire.

My first definite thought was that I was the witness
of a crime as audacious as it was bewildering. Yet, on
second thought, it was simple enough. The problem
of proximity had already been solved. With the utter
darkness had come the opportunity, the opportunity
that obviously had been watched for. With one move-
ment of the hand the necklace had been quietly and
cunningly removed.

My next quick thought was that the thief sat there in
my immediate neighborhood. There could be no other.
There was no room for doubt. By some mysterious
and dextrous movement the man beside me had
reached forward and with that delicacy of touch doubt-
less born of much experience had unclasped the jewels,
all the time shrouded by the utter darkness. The au-
dacity of the thing was astounding, yet the complete-
ness with which it had succeeded was even more
astounding.

I sat there compelling myself to a calmness which
was not easy to achieve. I struggled to make my scru-
tiny of this strange companion of mine as quiet and
leisured as possible.

256 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEE£

Yet he seemed to feel that he was still under my
eye. He seemed to chafe at that continued survey ; for
even as I studied him I could see a fine sweat of em-
barrassment come out on his face. He did not turn
and look at me directly, but it was plain that he was
only too conscious of my presence. And even before
I quite realized what he was about, he reached quietly
over, and taking up his hat and coat, rose to his feet
and slipped out of the box.

That movement on his part swept away my last
shred of hesitation. The sheer precipitancy of his
flight was proof enough of his offense. His obvious
effort to escape made me more than ever determined
to keep on his trail.

And keep on his trail I did, from the moment he
sidled guiltily out of that lighted theater foyer into
the still drizzling rain of Broadway. Stronger and
ever stronger waves of indignation kept sweeping
through me as I watched him skulk northward, with
a furtive glance over his shoulder as he fled.

He was a good two hundred feet ahead of me when
I saw him suddenly turn and at the risk of a visit to
the hospital or the morgue, cross the street in the mid-
dle of the block, dodge desperately between the surface
cars and automobiles, and beat it straight for the Times
Building. I promptly threw decorum away and ran,
ran like a rabbit, until I came to the Forty-second
Street entrance to the drug store through whose re-
volving doors I had seen my man disappear. I felt
reasonably certain he wouldn't stop to drink an ice-
cream soda and he didn't, for as I hurried past the

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 257

fountain I caught sight of him turning into the stair-
way that leads to the subway station. I clashed ahead
but he was through the gate before I could catch up
with him. I had no time for a ticket as the guards
were already slamming shut the doors of a south-
bound "local."

"Buy me a ticket," I called to the astonished "chop-
per" as I tossed a dollar bill over the arm which he
thrust out to stop me. I did not wait to argue it out,
for the car door in front of me was already beginning
to close. I had just time to catapult my body in be-
tween that sliding door and its steel frame. I knew,
as I caught my breath again, that I was on the plat-
form of the car behind the jewel thief.

And I stood there, carefully scrutinizing the line of
car doors as we pulled into the Grand Central Station.
I did the same as we passed Thirty-third Street, and
the same again at Twenty-eighth Street. The man
had given no sign that he actually knew I was on his
track. He might or might not have seen me. As to
that I had no means of being certain. But I was cer-
tain of the fact that he was making off in a panic of
indeterminate fear, that he was doing his utmost to
evade pursuit.

This came doubly home to me as the train stopped
at Twenty-third Street and I saw him step quickly
out of the far end of the car, look about him, and dart
across the station platform and up the stairway two
steps at a time.

I was after him, even more hurriedly. By the time
I reached the street he was swinging up on the step

258 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

of a cross-town surface car. To catch that car was out
of the question, but I waited a moment and swung
aboard the one that followed it, thirty yards in the
rear. Peering ahead, I could plainly see him as he
dropped from his car on the northeast corner of Sixth
Avenue. I could see him as he hurried up the steps
of the Elevated, crossed the platform, and without so
much as buying a ticket, hurried down the southeast
flight of steps.

I had closed in on him by this time, so that we were
within a biscuit toss of each other. Yet never once
did he look about. He was now doubling on his
tracks, walking rapidly eastward along Twenty-third
Street. I was close behind him as he crossed Broad-
way, turning south, and then suddenly tacking about,
entered the hallway of the building that was once the
Hotel Bartholdi and promptly directed his steps toward
the side entrance on Twenty-third Street.

Even as he emerged into the open again he must
have seen the antediluvian night-hawk cab waiting
there at the curb. What his directions to the driver
were I had no means of knowing. But as that dripping
and water-proofed individual brought his whip lash
down on his steaming horse a door slammed shut in
my face. Once more I so far forgot my dignity as
to dodge and run like a rabbit, this time to the other
side of the cab as it swung briskly northward. One
twist and pull threw the cab door open and I tumbled
in — tumbled in to see my white-faced and frightened
jewel thief determinedly and frenziedly holding down
the handle of the opposite door

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 259

His face went ashen as I came sprawling and lurch-
ing against him. He would have leaped bodily from
the carriage, which was now swinging up an all but
deserted Fifth Avenue, had I not caught and held
him there with a grimness born of repeated exaspera-
tion.

He showed no intention of meekly submitting to
that detaining grasp. Seeing that he was finally cor-
nered, he turned on me and fought like a rat. His
strength, for one of his weight, was surprising. Much
more surprising, however, was his ferocity. And it
was a strange struggle, there in the half light of that
musty and many-odored night-hawk cab. There
seemed something subterranean about it, as though it
were a battle at the bottom of a well. And but for
one thing, I imagine, it would not, for me, have been
a pleasant encounter. It's a marvelous thing, however,
to know that you have Right on your side. The pano-
ply of Justice is as fortifying as any chain armor ever
made.

And I knew, as we fought like two wharf-rats under
a pier-end, that I was right. I knew that my cause
was the cause of law and order. That knowledge gave
me both strength and a boldness which carried me
through even when I saw my writhing and desperate
thief groping and grasping for his hip pocket, even
when I saw him draw from it a magazine-revolver that
looked quite ugly enough to stampede a regiment.
And as that sodden-leathered night-hawk went placidly
rolling up Fifth Avenue we twisted and panted and
grunted on its floor as though it were a mail-coach in

260 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

the Sierras of sixty years ago, fighting for the posses-
sion of that ugly firearm.

How I got it away from him I never quite knew.
But when I came to my senses I had him on the cab
floor and my knee on his chest, with his body bent
up like a letter U. I held him there while I went
through his pockets, quietly, deliberately, one by one,
with all the care of a customs inspector going through
a suspected smuggler.

I had no time to look over his wallet (which I re-
membered as being as big as a brief-bag) or his papers,
nor had I time to make sure how much of the jewelry
he wore might be his own. The one thing I wanted
was the pearl necklace with the pigeon-blood ruby.
And this necklace I found, carefully wrapped in a silk
handkerchief tucked down in his right-hand waistcoat
pocket — which, by the way, was provided with a but-
toned flap to make it doubly secure.

I looked over the necklace to make sure there could
be no mistake. Then I again wrapped it up in the silk
handkerchief and thrust it well down in my own waist-
coat pocket.

"Get up !" I told the man on the cab floor.

I noticed, as I removed my knee from his chest,
what a sorry condition his shirt-front was in and how
his tie had been twisted around under his right ear.
He lay back against the musty cushions, breathing
hard and staring at me out of eyes that were by no
means kindly.

"You couldn't work it!" I said, as I pocketed the
revolver and. having readjusted my own tie, buttoned

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 261

my overcoat across a sadly crumpled shirt-front. Then
for the first time the thief spoke.

"D'you know what this'll cost you?" he cried, white
to the lips.

'That's not worrying me," was my calm retort. "I
got what I came after."

He sat forward in his seat with a face that looked
foolishly threatening.

"Don't imagine you can get away with that," he de-
clared. I could afford to smile at his impotent fury.

"Just watch me!" I told him. Then I added more
soberly, with my hand on the door-knob, "And if you
interfere with me after I leave this cab, if you so
much as try to come within ten yards of me to-night,
I'll give you what's coming to you."

I opened the door as I spoke, and dropped easily
from the still moving cab to the pavement. I stood
there for a moment, watching its placid driver as he
went on up the avenue. The glass-windowed door
still swung open, swaying back and forth like a hand-
slowly waving me good-by.

Then I looked at my watch, crossed to the University
Club, jumped into a waiting taxi, and dodged back to
the theater, somewhat sore in body but rather well
satisfied in mind.

A peculiar feeling of superiority possessed me as I
presented my door-check and was once more ushered
back to my empty box. During the last hour and a
half that pit full of languid-eyed people had been wit-
nessing a tawdry imitation of adventure. They had
been swallowing a capsule of imitation romance, while

262 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

I, between the time of leaving and reentering that
garishly lighted foyer, had reveled in adventure at
first hand, had taken chances and faced dangers and
righted a great wrong.

I felt inarticulately proud of myself as I watched
the final curtain come down. This pride became a
feeling of elation as I directed my glance toward Alice
Churchill, who had risen in the box in front of mine,
and was again showering on me the warmth of her
friendly smile. I knew I was still destined to be the
god from the machine. It was as plain that she was still
unconscious of her loss.

I stopped her and her hollow-cheeked brother on
their way out, surprising them a little, I suppose, by
the unlooked-for cordiality of my greeting.

"Can't you two children take a bite with me at
Sherry's?" I amiably suggested. I could see brother
and sister exchange glances.

"Benny oughtn't to be out late," she demurred.

"But I've something rather important to talk over,"
I pleaded.

"And Benny would like to get a glimpse of Sherry's
again," interposed the thin-cheeked youth just back
from the wilds. And without more ado I bundled them
into a taxi and carried them off with me, wondering
just what would be the best way of bringing up the
subject in hand.

I found it much harder, in fact, than I had expected.
I was, as time went on, more and more averse to be-
traying my position, to descending mildly from my pin-
nacle of superiority, to burning my little pin-wheel of

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 263

power. I was like a puppy with its first buried bone.
I knew what I carried so carefully wrapped up in my
waistcoat pocket. I remembered how it had come there,
and during that quiet supper hour I was inordinately
proud of myself.

I sat looking at the girl with her towering crown of
reddish-gold hair. She, in turn, was gazing at her
own foolishly distorted reflection in the polished bowl
of the chafing-dish from which I had just served her
with capon a la reine. She sat there gazing at her
reflected face, gazing at it with a sort of studious yet
impersonal intentness. Then I saw her suddenly lean
forward in her chair, still looking at the grotesque
image of herself in the polished silver. I could not
help noticing her quickly altering expression, the in-
articulate gasp of her parted lips, the hand that went
suddenly up to her throat. I saw the fingers feel
around the base of the compactly slender neck, and
the momentary look of stupor that once more swept
over her face.

She ate a mouthful of capon, studiously, without
speaking. Then she looked up at us again. It was
then that her brother Benny for the first time noticed
her change of color.

"What's wrong?" he demanded, his thin young face
touched suddenly with anxiety.

The girl, when she finally answered him, spoke very
quietly. But I could see what a struggle it was cost-
ing her.

"Now, Benny, I don't want any fuss," she said, al-
most under her breath. "I don't want either of you

264 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

to get excited, for it can't do a bit of good. But my
necklace is gone."

"Gone?" gasped Benny. "It can't be!"

"It's gone," she repeated, with her vacant eyes on
me as her brother prodded and felt about her skirt,
and then even shook out her crumpled opera cloak.

"Does this happen to be it?" I asked, with all the
nonchalance at my command. And as I spoke I un-
wrapped the string of pearls with the pigeon-blood
ruby and let them roll on the white damask that lay
between us.

She looked at them without moving, her eyes wide
with wonder. I could see the color come back into
her face. It was quite reward enough to witness the
relieving warmth return to those widened eyes, to bask
in that lovely and liquid glance of gratitude.

"How," she asked a little weakly, as she reached
over and took them up in her fingers, "how did you
get them?"

"You lost them in the theater-box during the first
act," I told her. Her brother Benny wiped his fore-
head.

"And it's up to a woman to drop forty thousand
dollars and never know it," he cried.

I watched her as she turned them over in her hands.
Then she suddenly looked up at me, then down at the
pearls, then up at me again.

"This is not my necklace," were the astonishing
words that I heard fall from her lips. I knew, of
course, that she was mistaken.

"Oh, yes, it is," I quietly assured her.

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 265

She shook her head in negation, still staring at me.

"What makes you think so?" she asked.

"I don't think it, I know it," was my response.
"Those aren't the sort of stones that grow on every
bush in this town."

She was once more studying the necklace. And
once more she shook her head.

"But I am left-handed," she was explaining, as she
still looked down at them, "and I had my clasp, here on
the ruby at the back, made to work that way. This
clasp is right-handed. Don't you see, it's on the wrong
side."

"But you've only got the thing upside down," cried
her brother. And I must confess that a disagreeable
feeling began to manifest itself in the pit of my stom-
ach as he moved closer beside her and tried to reverse
the necklace so that the clasp would stand a left-handed
one.

He twisted and turned it fruitlessly for several mo-
ments.

"Isn't that the limit?" he finally murmured, sinking
back in his chair and regarding me with puzzled eyes.
The girl, too, was once more studying my face, as
though my movement represented a form of uncouth
jocularity which she could not quite comprehend.

"What's the answer, anyway?" asked the mystified
youth.

But his bewilderment was as nothing compared to
mine. I reached over for the string of pearls with the
ruby clasp. I took them and turned them over and
over in my hands, weakly, mutely, as though they

266 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

themselves might in some way solve an enigma which'
seemed inscrutable. And I had to confess that the
whole thing was too much for me. I was still look-
ing down at that lustrous row of pearls, so appealing
to the eye in their absolute and perfect graduation,
when I heard the younger man at my side call my
name aloud.

"Kerfoot!" he said, not exactly in alarm and not
precisely in anxiety, yet with a newer note that made
me look up sharply.

As I did so I was conscious of the figure so close
behind me, so near my chair that even while I had
already felt his presence there, I had for the moment
taken him for my scrupulously attentive waiter. But
as I turned about and looked up at this figure I saw
that I was mistaken. My glance fell on a wide-shoul-
dered and rather portly man with quiet and very deep-
set gray eyes. What disturbed me even more than
his presence there at my shoulder was the sense of
power, of unparaded superiority, on that impassive yet
undeniably intelligent face.

"I want to see you," he said, with an unemotional
matter-of-factness that in another would have verged
on insolence.

"About what?" I demanded, trying to match his im-
passivity with my own.

He nodded toward the necklace in my hand.

"About that," he replied.

"What about that?" I languidly inquired.

The portly man at my shoulder did not answer me.
Instead he turned and nodded toward a second man, a

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 267

man standing half a dozen paces behind him, in a damp
overcoat and a sadly rumpled shirt-front.

I felt my heart beat faster of a sudden, for it took
no second glance to tell me that this second figure was
the jewel thief whom I had trailed and cornered in the
musty-smelling cab.

I felt the larger man's sudden grip on my shoulder
— and his hand seemed to have the strength of a vise
— as the smaller man, still pale and disheveled, stepped
up to the table. His face was not a pleasant one.

Benny Churchill, whose solicitous eyes bent for a
moment on his sister's startled face, suddenly rose to
his feet.

"Look here," he said, with a quiet vigor of which I
had not dreamed him capable, "there's not going to
be any scene here." He turned to the man at my shoul-
der. "I don't know who you are, but I want you to
remember there's a lady at this table. Remember that,
please, or I'll be compelled to teach you how to!"

"Sit down!" I told him. "For heaven's sake, sit
down, all of you! There's nothing to be gained by
heroics. And if we've anything to say, we may as well
say it decently."

The two men exchanged glances as I ordered two
chairs for them.

"Be so good," I continued, motioning them toward
these chairs. "And since we have a problem to dis-
cuss, there's no reason we can't discuss it in a semi-
civilized manner."

"It's not a problem," said the man at my shoulder,
with something disagreeably like a sneer.

268 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Then by all means don't let's make it one," I pro-
tested.

The man behind me was the first to drop into the
empty seat on my left. The other man crossed to
the farther side of the table, still watching me closely.
Then he felt for the chair and slowly sank into it ; but
not once did he take his eyes from my face. I was
glad that our circle had become a compact one, for
the five of us were now ranged sufficiently close about
the table to fence off our little white-linen kingdom of
dissension from the rest of the room.

"That man's armed, remember!" the jewel thief
suddenly cried to the stranger on my left. He spoke
both warningly and indignantly. His flash of anger,
in fact, seemed an uncontrollable one.

"Where's your gun?" said the quiet-eyed man at
my side. His own hand was in his pocket, I noticed,
and there was a certain malignant line of purpose about
his mouth which I did not at all like.

Yet I was able to laugh a little as I put the magazine
revolver down on the table; it had memories which
were amusing.

The quick motion with which he removed that gun,
however, was even more laughable. Yet my returning
sense of humor in no way impressed him.

"Where'd you get that gun?" he inquired.

I nodded my head toward the white-faced man op-
posite me.

"I took it away from your friend there," was my
answer.

"And what else did you take ?"

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 269

There was something impressive about the man's
sheer impersonality. It so kept things down to cases.

"This pearl necklace with the ruby clasp," I an-
swered.

"Why?" demanded my interlocutor.

"Because he stole it," was my prompt retort. The
big man was silent for a moment.

"From whom?"

"From the lady you have the honor of facing," I
answered.

"Where?" was his next question.

I told him. He was again silent for a second or two.

"D'you know who this man is?" he said, with a
curt head-nod toward his white-faced colleague.

"Yes," I answered.

"What is he?"

"He's a jewel thief."

The two men stared at each other. Then the man
at my side rubbed his chin between a meditative thumb
and forefinger. He was plainly puzzled. He began to
take on human attributes, and he promptly became a
less interesting and a less impressive figure. He looked
at Alice Churchill and at her brother, and then back
at me again.

Then, having once more absently caressed his chin,
he swung about and faced the wondering and silent
girl who sat opposite him.

"Excuse me, miss, but would you mind answering
a question or two?"

It was her brother who spoke before she had time
to answer.

270 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Wait," he interposed. "Just who are you, any-
way?

The man, for answer, lifted the lapel of his coat
and exhibited a silver badge.

"Well, what does that mean?" demanded the quite
unimpressed youth.

"That I'm an officer."

"What kind— a detective?"

"Yes."

"For what? For this place?"

'No, for the Maiden Lane Protective Association."

'Well, what's that got to do with us ?"

The large-bodied man looked at him a little im-
patiently.

"You'll understand that when the time comes," was
his retort. "Now, young lady," he began again, swing-
ing back to the puzzled girl, "do you say you lost a
necklace in that theater-box?"

The girl nodded.

"Yes, I must have," she answered, looking a little
frightened.

"And you say it was stolen from you ?"

"No, I didn't say that. I had my necklace on when
I was in the box — both Benny and I know that."

"And it disappeared ?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"I noticed it was gone when I sat down at the table
here."

The dominating gentleman turned round to me.

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 271

"You saw the necklace from the second box?" he
demanded.

"I did," was my answer.

"And you saw it disappear?" he demanded.

"I saw when it disappeared," I retorted.

The jewel thief with the crumpled shirt-front tried
to break in at this juncture, but the bigger man quickly
silenced him with an impatient side swing of the
hand.

"When was that?" he continued.

"What difference does it make?" I calmly inquired,
resenting the peremptoriness of his interrogations.

He stopped short and looked up at me. Then the
first ghost of a smile, a patient and almost sorrowful
smile, came to his lips.

"Well, we'll go at it another way. You witnessed
this man across the table take the necklace from the
young lady?"

"It practically amounts to that."

"That is, you actually detected him commit this
crime?"

"I don't think I said that."

"But you assumed he committed this crime?"

"Rather."

"Just when was it committed ?"

"During what they call a dark change in the first
act."

"You mean the necklace was on before that change
and gone when the lights were turned up again ?"

"Precisely."

272 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"And the position and actions of this man were
suspicious to you?"

"Extremely so."

"In what way?"

"In different ways."

"He had crowded suspiciously close to the wearer
of the necklace?"

"He had."

"And his eyes were glued on it during the early
part of that act?"

"They certainly were."

"And you watched him?"

"With almost as much interest as he watched the
necklace."

"And after the dark change, as you call it, the lady's
neck was bare?"

"It was."

"You're sure of this?"

"Positive."

"And what did this man across the table do ?"

"Having got what he was after, he hurried out of
the theater and made his escape — or tried to make his
escape."

"It embarrassed him, I suppose, to have you study-
ing him so closelv?"

"He certainly looked embarrassed."

"Of course," admitted my interrogator. Then he
sighed deeply, almost contentedly, after which he sat
with contemplative and pursed-up lips.

"I guess I've got this whole snarl now," he com-
placently admitted. "All but one kink."

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 273

"What one kink?" demanded Benny Churchill.

The man at my side did not answer him. Instead,
he rose to his feet.

"I want you to come with me," he had the effrontery
to remark, with a curt head-nod in my direction.

"I much prefer staying here," I retorted. And for
the second time he smiled his saddened smile.

"Oh, it's nothing objectionable," he explained. "No-
body's going to hurt you. And we'll be back here in
ten minutes."

"But, oddly enough, I have rooted objections to de-
serting my guests."

"Your guests won't be sorry, I imagine," he replied,
as he looked at his silver turnip of a watch. "And
we're losing good time."

"Please go," said Alice Churchill, emboldened, ap-
parently, by some instinctive conclusion which she
could not, or did not care to, explain. And she was
backed up, I noticed, by a nod from her brother.

I also noticed, as I rose to my feet, that I still held
the necklace in my hand. I was a little puzzled as to
just what to do with it.

"That," said the sagacious stranger, "you'd better
leave here. Let the young lady keep it until we get
back. And you, Fessant," he went on, turning to the
belligerent-lipped jewel thief, "you stay right here and
make yourself pleasant. And without bein' rude, you
might see that the young lady and her brother stay
right here with you."

Then he took me companionably by the arm and
led me away.

274 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"What's the exact meaning of all this?" I inquired
as we threaded our course out to the cab-stand and
went dodging westward along Forty-third Street in a
taxi. The rain, I noticed, through the fogged window,
was still falling.

"I want you to show me exactly where that man sat
in that box," was his answer. "And two minutes in
the theater will do it."

"And what good," I inquired, "is that going to do
me?"

"It may do you a lot of good," he retorted, as he
flung open the cab door.

"I feel rather sorry for you if it doesn't," was my
answer as I followed him out. We had drawn up be-
fore a desolate-looking stage door over which burned
an even more desolate-looking electric bulb. The man
turned and looked at me with a short ghost of a
grunt, more of disgust than contempt.

"You're pretty nifty, aren't you, for a New York
edition of Jesse James ?"

And without waiting for my answer he began kick-
ing on the shabby-looking stage door with his foot.
He was still kicking there when the door itself was
opened by a man in a gray uniform, obviously the
night watchman.

"Hello, Tim !" said the one.

"Hello, Bud !" said the other.

"Doorman gone?"

" 'Bout an hour ago!"

Then ensued a moment of silence.

"Burnside say anything was turned in ?"

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 275

"Didn't hear of it," was the watchman's answer.

"My friend here thinks he's left something in a
box. Could you let us through?"

"Sure," was the easy response. "I'll throw on the
house-lights for youse. Watch your way!"

He preceded us through a maze of painted canvas
and what looked like the backs of gigantic picture-
frames. He stepped aside for a moment to turn on a
switch. Then he opened a narrow door covered with
sheet-iron, and we found ourselves facing the box en-
trances.

My companion motioned me into the second box
while he stepped briskly into that nearer the foot-lights.

"Now, the young lady sat there," he said, placing the
gilt chair back against the brass railing. Then he sat
down in it, facing the stage. Having done so, he
took off his hat and placed it on the box floor. "Now
you show me where that man sat."

I placed the chair against the plush-covered parapet
and dropped into it.

"Here," I explained, "within two feet of where you
are."

"All right!" was his sudden and quite unexpected
rejoinder. "That's enough ! That'll do !"

He reached down and groped about for his hat be-
fore rising from the chair. He brushed it with the
sleeve of his coat absently, and then stepped out of
the box.

"We'd better be getting back," he called to me from
the sheet-iron covered doorway.

"Back to what?" I demanded, as I followed him out

276 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

through the canvas-lined maze again, feeling that he
was in some way tricking me, resenting the foolish
mystery which he was flinging about the whole foolish
maneuver.

"Back to those guests of yours and some good old-
fashioned common sense," was his retort.

But during the ride back to Sherry's he had noth-
ing further to say to me. His answers to the ques-
tions I put to him were either evasive or monosyllabic.
He even yawned, yawned openly and audibly, as we
drew up at the carriage entrance of that munificently
lighted hostelry. He now seemed nothing more than
a commonplace man tired out at the completion of a
commonplace task. He even seemed a trifle impatient
at my delay as I waited to check my hat and coat —
a formality in which he did not join me.

"Now, I can give you people just two minutes," he
said, as the five of us were once more seated at the
same table and he once more consulted his turnip of
a watch. "And I guess that's more'n we'll need."

He turned to the wan and tired-eyed girl, who, only
too plainly, had not altogether enjoyed her wait.

"You've got the necklace?" he asked.

She held up a hand from which the string of grad-
uated pearls dangled. The man then turned to me.

"You took this string of pearls away from this
man?" he asked, with a quick nod toward the jewel
thief.

"I assuredly did," was my answer.

"Knowing he had taken them from this young lady
earlier in the evening?"

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 277

"Your assumption bears every mark of genius!" I
assured him.

He turned back to the girl.

"Is that your necklace?" he curtly demanded.

The girl looked at me with clouded and troubled
eyes. We all felt, in some foolish way, that the mo-
ment was a climactic one.

"No !" she answered, in little more than a whisper.

"You're positive?"

She nodded her head without speaking. The man
turned to me.

"Yet you followed this man, assaulted him, and
forcibly took that necklace away from him ?"

"Hold on!" I cried, angered by that calmly peda-
gogic manner of his. "I want you to un — "

He stopped me with a sharp move of the hand.

"Don't go over all that !" he said. "It's a waste of
'time. The point is, that necklace is not your friend's.
But I'm going to tell you what it is. It's a duplicate
of it, stone for stone. The lady, I think, will agree
with me on that. Am I right ?"

The girl nodded.

"Then what the devil's this man doing with it?"
demanded Benny Churchill, before any of us could
speak.

"S'pose you wait and find out who this man is !"

"Well, who is he?" I inquired, resolved that no
hand, however artful, was going to pull the wool over
my eyes.

"This man," said my unperturbed and big-shoul-
dered friend, "is the pearl-matcher for Cohen and

278 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Greenhut, the Maiden Lane importers. Wait, don't
interrupt me. Miss Churchill's necklace, I understand,
was one of the finest in this town. His house had an
order to duplicate it. He took the first chance, when
the pearls had been matched and strung, to see that
he'd done his job right."

"And you mean to tell me," I cried, "that he hung
over a box-rail and lifted a string of pearls from a
lady's neck just to — "

"Hold on there, my friend," cut in the big-limbed
man. "He found this lady was going to be in that
box wearin' that necklace."

"And having reviewed its chaste beauty, he sneaked
out of his own box and ran like a chased cur!"

"Hold your horses now! Can't you see that he
thought you were the crook? If you had a bunch of
stones like that on you and a stranger butted in and
started trailin' you, wouldn't you do your best to melt
away when you had the chance?" demanded the of-
ficer. Then he looked at me again with his wearily
uplifted eyebrows. "Oh, I guess you were all right as
far as you went, but, like most amateurs, you didn't
go quite far enough!"

It was Benny Churchill who spoke up before I could
answer. His voice, as he spoke, was oddly thin and
childlike.

"But why in heaven's name should he want to dupli-
cate my sister's jewelry?"

"For another woman, with more money than brains,
or the know-how, or whatever you want to call it,"
was the impassive response.

A RIALTO RAIN-STORM 279

I saw the girl across the table from me push the
necklace away from her, and leave it lying there in a
glimmering heap on the white table. I promptly and
quietly reached out and took possession of it, for I
still had my own ideas of the situation.

"That's all very well," I cried, "and very interesting.
But what I want to know is : who got the. first neck-
lace r

The big- framed man looked once more at his watch.
Then he looked a little wearily at me.

"I got 'em!"

"You've got them?" echoed both the girl and her
brother. It was plain that the inconsequentialities of
the last hour had been a little too much for them.

The man thrust a huge hand down in the pocket of
his damp and somewhat unshapely overcoat.

"Yes, I got 'em here," he explained as he drew his
hand away and held the glimmering string up to the
light. "I picked 'em up from the corner of that box
where they slipped off the lady's neck."

He rose placidly and ponderously to his feet.

"And I guess that's about all," he added as he
squinted through an uncurtained strip of plate glass
and slowly turned up his coat collar, "except that some
of us outdoor guys'll sure get webfooted if this rain
keeps up!"

CHAPTER X

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE

T WAS being followed. Of that there was no longer
*■• a shadow of doubt. Move by move and turn by
turn, for even longer than I had been openly aware
of it, some one had been quietly shadowing me.

Now, if one thing more than another stirs the blood
of the man who has occasion to walk by night, it is
the discovery that his step* are being dogged. The
thought of being watched, of having a possible enemy
behind one, wakens a thrill that is ancestral.

So, instead of continuing my busily aimless circuit
about that high-spiked iron fence which encloses Gra-
mercy Park, I shot off at a tangent, continuing from
its northwest corner in a straight line toward Fourth
Avenue and Broadway.

I had thought myself alone in that midnight abode
of quietness. Only the dread of a second sleepless
night had kept me there, goading me on in my febrile
revolutions until weariness should send me stumbling
off my circuit like a six-day rider off his wheel.

Once I was in the house-shadows where Twenty-first
Street again begins I swung about and waited. I
stood there, in a sort of quiet belligerency, watching
the figure of the man who had been dogging my steps.
I saw him turn southward in the square, as though my
flight were a matter of indifference to him. Yet the
sudden relieving thought that his movements might

280

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 281

have been as aimless as my own was swallowed up by
a second and more interesting discovery.

It was the discovery that the man whom I had ac-
cepted as following me was in turn being followed by
yet another man.

I waited until this strange pair had made a full
circuit of the iron-fenced enclosure. Then I turned
back into the square, walking southward until I came
opposite my own house door. The second man must
have seen me as I did so. Apparently suspicious of
possible espionage, he loitered with assumed careless-
ness at the park's southern corner. The first man,
the slighter and younger-looking figure of the two,
kept on his unheeding way, as though he were the
ghost-like competitor in some endless nightmare of a
Marathon.

My contemplation of him was interrupted by the
advent of a fourth figure, a figure which seemed to
bring something sane and reassuring to a situation
that was momentarily growing more ridiculous. For
the newcomer was McCooey, the patrolman. He
swung around to me without speaking, like a ferry
swinging into its slip. Then he stood looking impas-
sively up at the impassive November stars.

"Yuh're out late," he finally commented, with that
careless ponderosity which is the step-child of unques-
tioned authority.

"McCooey," I said, "there's a night prowler going
around this park of yours. He's doing it for about
the one hundred and tenth time. And I wish you'd
find out what in heaven he means by it."

282 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Been disturbin' yuh?" casually asked the law in-
carnate. Yet he put the question as an indulgent phy-
sician might to a patient. McCooey was of that type
which it is both a joy and a temptation to mystify.

"He's assaulted my curiosity," I solemnly com-
plained.

"D' yuh mean he's been interferin' wid yuh?" de-
manded my literal friend.

"I mean he's invaded my peace of mind."

"Then I'll see what he's afther," was the other's
answer. And a moment later he was swinging negli-
gently out across the pavement at a line which would
converge with the path of the nervously pacing strang-
er. I could see the two round the corner almost to-
gether. I could see McCooey draw nearer and nearer.
I could even see that he had turned and spoken to the
night walker as they went down the square together
past the lights of the Players.

I could see that this night-walker showed neither
resentment nor alarm at being so accosted. And I
could also see that the meeting of the two was a source
of much mystification to the third man, the man who
still kept a discreet watch from the street corner on
my right.

McCooey swung back to where I stood. He swung
back resentfully, like a retriever who had been sent on
a blind trail.

"What's he after, anyway?" I irritably inquired.

"He says he's afther sleep!"

"After what?"I demanded.

McCooey blinked up at a sky suddenly reddened by

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 283

an East River gas-flare. Then he took a deep and dis-
interested breath.

"He says he's afther sleep," repeated the patrol-
man. ''Unless he gets her, says he, he's goin to walk
into the East River."

"What's the matter with the man, anyway?" I asked,
for that confession had brought the pacing stranger
into something very close and kindred to me.

" 'Tis nothin' much," was the big man's answer.
"Like as not he's been over-eatin' and havin' a bad
night or two."

And with that my friend the patrolman, turning on
his heel, pursued his way through the quiet canyons of
the streets where a thousand happy sleepers knew
nothing of his coming and saw nothing of his going.

I stood there, looking after him as he went. Then
I crossed to the northwest corner of that iron-fenced
enclosure and waited for that youth whom the arm of
wakefulness was swinging about like a stone in a sling.

I deliberately blocked his way as he tried to edge
irritably about me.

"Pardon me," I began. He looked up, like a som-
nambulist suddenly awakened. "Pardon me, but I
think I ought to warn you that you are being fol-
lowed."

"Am I?"

"Yes; and I think you ought to know it."

"Oh, I know it," was his apathetic response. "I'm
even beginning to get used to it."

He stepped back and leaned against the iron fence.
His face, under the street-lamps, was a very unhappy

284 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

looking one. It carried a woebegone impassivity, the
impassivity which implied he was so submerged in mis-
ery that no further blow could be of consequence to
him. And yet, beyond the fixed pallor of that face there
was something appealing, some trace of finer things,
some touch which told me that he and the nocturnal
underworld had nothing in common.

"But are you getting used to the other thing?" I
asked.

"What other thing?" was his slow inquiry. I could
see the twin fires of some dull fever burnine in the
depths of his cavernous eyes.

"Going without sleep," I answered. For the sec-
ond time he stared at me.

"But I'm going to sleep," he answered. "I've got
to!"

"We all have to," I platitudinously remarked. "But
there are times when we all don't."

He laughed a curious little mirthless laugh.

"Are you ever troubled that way?" he asked.

We stood there facing each other, like two kindred
ghosts communing amid the quietness of a catacomb.
Then I laughed, but not so bitterly, I hope, as he had
done.

"I've walked this square," I told him, "a thousand
times to your one."

"I've been doing it "here for the last three hours,"
he quietly confessed.

"And it's done you up," I rejoined. "And what
we both need is a quiet smoke and an hour or two
with our feet up on something?"

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 285

"That's very good of you," he had the grace to ad-
mit, as his gaze followed mine toward the house door.
"But there are a number of things I've got to think
out."

He was a decent sort. There was no doubt of that.
But it was equally plain that he was in a bad way
about something or other.

"Let's think it out together!" I had the boldness to
suggest.

He laughed mirthlessly, though he was already mov-
ing southward along the square with me as he began
to speak again.

"There is something I've got to think out alone," he
told me. He spoke, this time without resentment, and
I was glad of it. That unhappy-eyed youth had in some
way got a grip, if not on my affection, at least on my
interest. And in our infirmity we had a bond of sym-
pathy. We were like two refugees pursued by the
same bloodhounds and seeking the same trails of
escape. I felt that I was violating no principle of reti-
cence in taking him by the arm.

"But why can't you slip in to my digs," I suggested,
"for a smoke and a drop of Bristol Milk?"

I was actually wheedling and coaxing him, as a stub-
born child is coaxed.

"Milk!" he murmured. "I never drink milk."

"But, my dear man, Bristol Milk isn't the kind that
comes from cows. It's seventy-year old sherry that's
been sent on a sea-voyage to Australia and back. It's
something that's oil to the throat and music to the
senses !"

236 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

He looked at me as though the whole width of a
Hudson River flowed between us.

"That sounds appealing," he acknowledged. "But
I'm in a mess that even Bristol Milk won't wash me
out of."

"Well, if it's that bad, it's worth forgetting for an
hour or two!" I announced. He laughed again, re-
laxingly. I took a firmer and more fraternal grip on
his arm.

And side by side we went up the steps and through
the door into the quietness of that sober-fronted house
which I still called by the empty name of home.

In five minutes I had a hickory log ablaze in the fire-
place, the library-chairs drawn up, and Criswell, my
captive, with his hat and coat off. At his side stood a
plate of biscuits and a glass of Bristol Milk. But he
seemed to find more consolation in sitting back and
peering at the play of the flames. His face was a
very tired one. The skin was clammy and dead-look-
ing ; and yet from the depths of that fatigue flared the
familiar ironic white lights of wakefulness. I think
I knew about how he felt.

We sat there without speaking, yet not unconscious
of a silent communion of thought. I knew, however,
that Bristol Milk was not in the habit of leaving a
man long tongued-tied. So I turned to refill his glass.
I had noticed that his hands were shaky, just as I had
noticed the telltale twitch to one of his eyelids. But
when his uncontrolled fingers accidently knocked the
glass from the edge of the table, it gave me a bit of
a start.

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 287

He sat there looking studiously down at the scat-
tered pieces of crystal.

'Tt's hell!" he suddenly burst out.

"What is?" I inquired.

"Being in this sort of shape!" was his vehement
response. I did not permit myself to look at him.
Sympathy was not the sort of thing he needed. Sev-
enty-year-old sherry, I felt, was more to the purpose.

"Especially when we haven't any excuse for it," I
lazily commented, passing him a second glass, filling
it, and turning to watch the fire.

"Warming stuff, that Bristol Milk," he said with a
catch of the breath that was too short to be called a
sigh. Then, laughing and wiping the sweat from his
forehead, he went on with an incoherence that ap-
proached that of childhood.

"I've got an excuse."

I waited for a moment or two.

"What is it?"

"That man you saw trailing me around the square,
for one thing."

"Even that isn't altogether an excuse," I maintained.

"But it's what he stands for," protested my visitor.
He sat staring into the fire for a minute or two. I sat
beside him, again conscious of some inarticulate and
evasive companionship.

"How did it begin ?" I finally asked.

He took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes.
And when he spoke he did so without opening them.

"I don't think I could explain," was his listless
answer.

288 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Make a try at it," I urged. "Let's ventilate the
thing, canalize it Let's throw a little light and order
into it."

He moved his head up and down, slowly, as though
he had some vague comprehension of the psychology
of confession, some knowledge of the advantages of
"exteriorating" secret offenses. Then he sat very still
and tense.

"But there's no way of ventilating this. There's no
way of knocking a window in it It's — it's only a
blank wall."

"Why a blank wall?" I inquired.

He turned and looked past me, with unseeing eyes.

"Because I can't remember," he said in a voice which
made it seem that he was speaking more to himself
than to me. He looked about him, with a helplessness
that was pitiful. "I can't remember!" he repeated,
with the forlornness of a frightened child.

"That's exactly what I wanted to get at," I cried,
with a pretense at confident and careless intimacy. "So
let's clear away in front of the blank wall. Let's at
least try a kick or two at it."

"It's no use," he complained.

"Well, let's try*," I persisted, with forced cheerful-
ness. "Let's get at the beginning of things."

"How far back do you want me to go?" he finally
asked. He spoke with the weary listlessness of a pa-
tient confronted by an unwelcome practitioner.

"Let's begin right at the first," I blithely suggested

He sat looking at his shaking fingers for a moment
or two.

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 289

"There's really nothing much to begin at," he tried
to explain. 'These things don't seem to begin in a
minute, or an hour, or a day."

"Of course not," I assented as I waited for him to
go on.

"The thing I noticed at the time, about the only
thing I even thought of, was that my memory seemed
to have a blind spot — a blind spot the same as an eye
has."

"111?" I asked. "Or overworking?"

"I guess I'd been pounding away pretty hard. I
know I had. You see, I wanted to make good in that
office. So I must have been biting off more than I
could chew."

"What office?" I asked as he came to a stop. He
looked up at me with a stare of dazed perplexity.

"Didn't I tell you that?" he asked, massaging his
frontal bone with the ends of his unsteady fingers.
"Why, I mean John Lockwood's office."

"John Lockwood?" I repeated, with a sudden tight-
ening of the nerves. "Do you mean the railway-invest-
ment man, the man who made so many millions up
along the northwest coast ?"

The youth in the chair nodded. And I made an
effort to control my feelings, for John Lockwood, I
knew only too well, was the father of Mary Lockwood.
He, like myself, had exploited the Frozen North, but
had exploited it in a manner very different from
mine.

"Go on," I said, after quite a long pause.

"Lockwood brought me down from the Canadian

290 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

Northern offices in Winnipeg. He said he'd give me
a chance in the East — the chance of my life."

"What were you in his office?"

"I suppose you'd call it private secretary. But I
don't think he knew what I was himself."

"And he let you overwork yourself ?"

"No, I can't say that. It wasn't his fault. You
see, his work this summer kept him out at the coast
a good deal of the time. He had an English mining
engineer named Carlton looking over some British
Columbia interests."

"And you carried on the office work while Lockwood
was out west ?"

"I did what I could to keep my end of the thing
going. But, you see, it was all so new to me. I
hadn't got deep enough into the work to organize it
the way I wanted to. There were a lot of little things
that couldn't be organized."

"Why not?"

"Well, this man Carlton, for instance, had Lock-
wood's office look after his English mail. All his let-
ters had to be sent on to whatever point he reported
from."

"Well?"

"When Lockwood was away from the office he depu-
tized me to look after his mail, sign for the registered
letters, re-direct telegrams, see that everything went
through to the right point. It was quite a heavy mail.
Carlton, I guess, was a man of importance, and be-
sides that he was investing for friends at home. Look-
ing after it, of course, was simple enough, but — "

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 291

"Wait!" I interrupted. "Has this mail anything to
do with our blank wall ?"

He looked about at me as though he had seen me
for the first time, as though all that while he had been
merely thinking aloud.

"Why that is the blank wall," he cried.

"How?" I demanded.

"Four weeks ago Lockwood came back from the
West. On the same day a registered letter came to
the office for young Carlton. That letter held twe1ve
Bank of England notes for a hundred pounds facifc
About six thousand dollars altogether."

"Where did it come from?"

"From Montreal, from Carlton's own father. He
wanted the money forwarded to his son. The older
man was on his way back to England. The younger
Carlton was looking up certain lands his father wanted
to invest in. Young Carlton's movements were rather
uncertain, so his father made sure by sending the letter
to our office — to Lockwood's office."

"And you were still acting as poste restante for the
Carlton out in British Columbia?"

"Yes, we'd been receiving and forwarding his mail."

"And?"

"We also received this registered letter from Mon-
treal. That's where the blank wall comes in."

"How?"

"We've no record of that letter ever going out of
our office."

He looked at me as though he expected me to be
more electrified than I found it possible to be.

292 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Lost, stolen, or strayed?" I asked.

"That's what I'd give my eye-teeth to know," he
solemnly asserted.

"But where do you come in?"

His answer was given without the slightest shade
of emotion.

"I signed for the letter."

"Then you remember that much ?"

"No, I don't remember it. But when they began to
in-estigate through the post-office, I knew my own
rt^iature when I saw it."

"With no chance of mistake, or forgery ?"

"It was my own signature."

"And you don't even remember getting the letter?"

"I've gone back over that day with draghooks. I've
thought over it all night at a stretch, but I can't get
one clear idea of what I did."

The force of the situation was at last coming home
to me.

"And they're holding you responsible for the dis-
appearance of that letter?"

"Good God, I'm holding myself responsible for it!
It's been hanging over me for nearly a month. And
I can't stand much more of it!"

"Then let's go back to possibilities. Have you ever
checked them over?"

"I've gone over 'em like a scrutineer over a voter's
list. I've tested 'em all, one by one; but they all end
up at the blank wall."

"Well, before we go back to these possibilities again,
how about the personal equation ? Have you any feel-

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 293

ing, any emotional bias, any one inclination about the
thing, no matter how ridiculous it may seem?"

He closed his eyes, and appeared to be deep in
thought.

"I've always felt one thing," he confessed, "I've al-
ways felt — mind you, I only say felt — that when I
signed for that Carlton letter, I carried it into Lock-
wood's own room with his own personal mail, and
either gave it to him or left it on his desk."

"What makes you feel that ?"

"In the first place, I must have known he'd seen
Carlton recently, and had a clearer idea of his address
at the time, than I had. In the second place, being
registered, it must have impressed me as being com-
paratively important."

"And Lockwood himself ?"

"He says I'm mistaken. He holds I never gave him
the letter, or he would have remembered it."

"And circumstances seem to back him up in this?"

"Everything backs him up," was the answer.

"Then let's go back to the possibilities. How about
theft? Are you sure every one in the office was re-
liable?"

"Every one but me!" was his bitter retort.

"Then how about its being actually lost inside those
four walls?"

"That's scarcely possible. I've gone through every
nook and drawer and file. I've gone over the place
with a fine-tooth comb, time and time again. I've even
gone over my own flat, every pocket and every corner
of every room."

294 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Then you have a home?" I asked.

Again there was the telltale neurasthenic delay be-
fore his answer came.

"I was married the same week the letter was lost,"
was his response.

"And your wife hasn't been able to help you re-
member ?"

"She didn't know of it until a week ago. Then she
saw I couldn't sleep, and kept forgetting things, trifling
little things that showed I wasn't coordinating proper-
ly— such as letting a letter go out unsigned or getting
muddled on the safe combination or not remembering
whether I'd eaten or not. She said she thought I was
in for typhoid or something like that. She went right
down to Lock wood and practically accused him of
making me overwork. Lockwood had to tell her what
had happened. I suppose it was the way it was thrown
at her, all in a heap! She went home to her own
people that afternoon, without seeing me. I thought it
over, and decided there was no use doing anything
until — until the mess was cleared up some way or
other."

I did not speak for several seconds. The case
was not as simple as it had seemed.

"And Lockwood, how does he feel about it?" I
finally asked.

"The way any man'd feel!" The acidulated smile
that wrinkled his face was significant. "He's having
me shadowed !"

"But he does nothing!"

"He keeps giving me more time."

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 295

"Well, doesn't that imply he still somehow believes
in you?"

"He doesn't believe in me," was the slow response.

"Then why doesn't he do something? Why doesn't
he act?"

There was a moment's silence. "Because he prom-
ised his daughter to give me another week."

Still again I experienced that odd tightening of the
nerves. And I had to take a grip on myself, before I
could continue.

"You mean Mary Lockwood personally interested
herself in your case?"

"Yes." *

That would be like Mary Lockwood, I remembered.
She would always want to be something more than
just; she would want to be merciful — with others. /
was the only one guilty of an offense which could not
be overlooked !

"But why Mary Lockwood?" I asked, for something
to say.

"She seemed to think I ought to be given a chance."
Criswell spoke with listless heaviness, as though Mary
Lockwood's pity, as though any one's pity, were a
thing of repugnance to him.

"A matter of thumbs down," I murmured. He
looked at me blankly; the idiom had not reached his
intelligence. I crossed to the table and poured him
out another glass of Bristol Milk.

"You say you did things to show you weren't
coordinating properly," I went on. "Now, going back
to possibilities, mightn't there have been a touch of

296 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

aphasia ? Mightn't you have done something with that
letter and had no memory of what it was?"

"It's not aphasia — it never was that," calmly retorted
the unhappy-eyed young man. "You couldn't dignify
it with a name like that. And it never amounted to
anything serious. I carried on all my office work with-
out a hitch, without one mistake. But, as I told you
before, I was working under pressure, and I hadn't
been sleeping well. I did the bigger things without a
mistake, but I often found I was doing them auto-
matically."

"Then let's go back once more to those possibilities.
Could the letter have been misdirected, absent-mind-
edly? Could it have gone to one of Carlton's ad-
dresses?"

"Every address has been canvassed. The thing's
been verified through the local post-office, and through
the Montreal office. That part of it's as clear as day-
light. A letter came to this office of Lockwood's ad-
dressed to Carlton. It held six thousand dollars in
cash. I received it and signed for it. The man to
whom it wras addressed never received it. Neither
the money nor the letter was ever seen again. And
the last record of it ends with me. Is it any wonder
they've got that gum-shoe man trailing me about every
move I make?"

"Wait," I cried, still conjecturing along the field
of possibilities. "Why mightn't that letter have come
in a second envelope which you removed after its
receipt? Why mightn't it have come addressed to
Lockwood or the firm ?"

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 297

"The post-office records show differently. It came to
Carlton. I signed for it as an agent of Carlton's. Oh,
there's no use going over all that old ground. I've
been over it until I thought I was going crazy. I've
raked and dug through it, these past three weeks,(
and nothing's come of it. Nothing can come of it, un-
til Lockwood gets tired of waiting for me to prove
what I can't prove!"

"But, out of all the affair as it happened, out of that
whole day when the letter came, isn't there one shred
or tatter of memory on which you can try to hang
something? Isn't there one thing, no matter how
small or how misty, from which you can begin?"

"Not one rational thing ! I've tried to build a bridge
out into that empty space — that day always seems like
empty space to me — I've tried to build it out like a
cantilever, but I can't bolt two ideas together. I've
tried to picture it ; I've tried to visualize it ; I've tried
to imagine it as I must have lived it. But all I've left
is the fool idea of a man hitting his thumb."

"What do you mean by that ?" I demanded, sitting up
with a jolt.

"I keep seeing somebody, somebody sitting in front
of me, holding a letter in his right hand and tapping
the thumb of his left hand with it as he talked."

"But who is it ? Or who was it ?"

"I've tried to imagine it was Lockwood."

"Why, you've something right there!" I exultantly
cried out. "That's valuable. It's something definite,
something concrete, something personal. Let's begin
on that."

298 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"It's no use," remarked my companion. His voice,
as he spoke, was one of weary unconcern. "I thought
the way you do, at first. I felt sure it would lead to
something. I kept watching Lockwood, trying to catch
him at the trick."

"And?" I prompted.

"I had no chance of making sure. So I went up
to his home, and asked for Miss Lockwood herself.
I tried to explain how much the whole thing meant
to me. I asked her if she's ever noticed her father in
the act of tapping his thumbs."

"And had she?"

"She was very patient. She thought it over, and
tried to remember, but she decided that I was mistaken.
His own daughter, she explained, would have noticed
any such mannerism as that. In fact, she ventured to
mention the matter to her father. And when John
Lockwood found I'd been up to his house, that way,
he — well, he rather lost his temper about it all. He
accused me of trying to play on his daughter's sym-
pathy, of trying to hide behind a petticoat. Miss Lock-
wood herself came and saw me again, though, and was
fine enough to say that she still believed in me, that she
still had faith in me. She said I could always count
on her help. But everything she did only seemed to
push me further back into the dark, the dark that's
worse than hell to me !"

He leaned far forward in the chair, covering his
face with his unsteady hands. I had no help to give
him.

But as I sat there staring at him I began to see what

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 299

he had gone through. Yet more disturbing than the
consciousness of this was the thought of what it would
eventually lead to, of what it was already leading to,
in that broken wreck of a walking ghost, in that terror-
hounded neurasthenic who had found a hole in his
memory and had kept exploring it, feeling about it
as one's tongue-tip keeps fathoming the cave of a lost
tooth.

"I went to a doctor, after she left me," the man in
the chair was saying through his gaunt fingers as their
tips pressed against his eye sockets. "He told me I
had to sleep. He gave me trional and bromides and
things, but I didn't seem able to assimilate them. Then
he told me it was all in my own mind, that I only had
to let myself relax. He told me to lie with my hands
down at my sides, and sigh, to sigh just once. I lay
all night as though I was in a coffin waiting for that
sigh, fighting for it, praying for it. But it didn't
come."

"Of course it didn't," I told him, for I knew the
feeling. "It never does, that way. You ought to
have taken a couple of weeks in the Maine woods, or
tried fishing up in Temagami, or gone off pounding a
golf ball fifteen miles a day."

Then I stopped and looked at him, for some sub-
sidiary part of my brain must have been working even
while I was talking.

"By heaven, I believe that girl was mistaken !"

"Mistaken?" he asked.

"Yes, I don't believe any girl really knows her
father's little tricks. I'd like to wager that Lockwood

3oo THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

has the habit of tapping his thumb nail, sometimes, with
what he may be holding in his other hand !"

My dispirited friend looked up at me, a little dis-
turbed by the vehemence of my outburst.

"But what's that to me now? What good does it
do me, even though he does tap his thumb?"

"Can't you see that this is exploration work, like
digging up a lost city ? Can't you see that we've got
to get down to at least one stone, and follow where
that first sign leads?"

I did my best to infect him with some trace of my
sudden enthusiasm. I wanted to emotionalize him out
of that dead flat monotone of indifference. I jumped
to my feet and brought a declamative hand down on
the corner of my library table.

"I tell you it does you a lot of good. It's your life-
buoy. It's the thing that's got to keep you afloat until
your feet are on solid ground again."

"I tried to feel that way about it once," was his
listless response. "But it doesn't lead to anything. It
only makes me decide I dreamed the whole thing."

I stared down at him as he leaned wearily back in
the heavy chair.

"Look here," I said. "I know you're pretty well
done up. I know you're sick and tired of the whole
hopeless situation, that you've given up trying to
think about it. But I want you to act this thing out for
me to-night. I want to try to dramatize that situation
down in Lockwood's office when you signed for the
Carlton letter. I want you to do everything you can
to visualize that moment. I want you to get that

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 301

cantilever bridge stuck out across the gulf, across the
gulf from each side, until you touch the middle and
give us a chance to bolt 'em together."

I pushed back the chairs, cleared the space on the
reading-table, swung the youth about so that he faced
this table, and then took one of my own letters from
the heavy brass stand beside him. My one object
now was to make him "go Berserk."

"This is your room," I told him. "And this is your
desk. Remember, you're in your office, hard at work.
Be so good, please, as to keep busy."

I crossed the room to the door as I spoke, intent on
my impersonation. But I could hear him as he laughed
his indulgent and mirthless laugh.

"Now, I'm bringing you this mail matter. And
here I have a registered letter addressed to one Carl-
ton. You see it, there ? This letter ? It's for Carlton,
remember. I want you to take it And sign for it,
here. Yes, write down your name — actually write
it. Now take the letter. And now think, man, think.
What do you do after that? What is the next thing?
What do you feel is the right thing? The only thing?"

He looked up at me, wonderingly. Then he looked
about the room. Then he slowly shook his head from
side to side. I had not succeeded in communicating
to him any jot of my own mental energy.

"I can't do it," he said, "I can't remember. It
doesn't seem to suggest a thing."

"But think, man, think!" I cried out at him. "Use
your imagination! Get into the part! Act it! The
thing's there in your head, I tell you. It's shut up

302 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

somewhere there, only you haven't hit the right com-
bination to throw the door open. You can't do a thing
in this life, you've never lived an active moment of this
life, without a record of it being left there. It may
be buried, it may be buried so deep you'll die without
digging it up, but it's there, I tell you, if you only go
after it!"

"If I was only sure it was there," hesitated the
man at the table. "If I only knew just what direction
to go! But this doesn't mean anything; it doesn't
get me anywhere."

"You're not in the part," I cried, with what was al-
most an ecstasy of impatience. "What you've got to
do is live, over that day. If you can't do that you've
got to live over at least one part of it. No ; don't think
this is all foolishness. It's only going back to a very
old law of association. I'm only trying to do something
to bring up sight, touch, sound. We both know those
are things that act quickest in reviving memory.
Can't you see — out of similar conditions I want to
catch at something that will suggest the similar action !
There's no need telling you that my mind and your
mind each has a permanent disposition to do again
what it has once done under the same circumstances.
There's no use delving into psychology. It's all such
ordinary every-day common sense."

He sat looking at me a little blankly as I pounded
this out at him. His pallid face, twitching in the light
from the fire, was studious, but only passively so. The
infection of my rhapsodic effort had not reached him.
I knew that, even before he spoke.

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 303

"I can see what you're aiming at," he explained.
"But no matter how hard I think, I can't get beyond
the blank wall. I'm still in this library of yours. And
this is still a table and nothing like Lockwood's office
desk."

"And that makes it seem rather silly to you?"

"Yes, it does seem silly," he acknowledged.

Then a sudden idea fell like a hailstone out of the
heavens themselves.

"I know what's the matter," I cried. "I know why
you're not acting out the part. It's because you're
not on the right stage. You know it's an empty re-
hearsal— you haven't been able to let yourself go!"

"I'm sorry," he said, with the contrition of a child,
and with his repeated hand-gesture of helplessness.

I swung about on him, scarcely hearing the words he
was uttering.

"We've got to get into that office," I declared.
"We've got to get into Lockwood's own office."

He shook his head, without looking up at me.

"I've been over that office, every nook and cranny
of it!" he reiterated.

"But what I want to know is, can we get into it?"

"At this time of night?" he asked, apparently a
little frightened at the mere idea of it.

"Yes, now," I declared.

"I'd rather not," he finally averred.

"But you still carry those office-keys, don't you?" I
asked.

"Yes; I still have my keys. But it wouldn't look
right, the way things are. It would be only too easy

304 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

for them to misinterpret a midnight visit of mine to
those offices. And they're watching me, every move
I make."

"Then let them know you're going to make the
move," I maintained. "And then we'll slip down in
my car, with no chance of being followed."

He seemed to be turning the matter over in his mind.
Then he looked up, as though a sudden light had clari-
fied the whole situation.

"You know Mary Lockwood, don't you?" he de-
manded.

"Y-yes," I hesitatingly admitted.

"Then wouldn't it be easier for you to call her up on
the telephone and explain just what you propose do-
ing?"

It was my turn to sit in a brown study. It would
be no easy matter, I remembered, to make clear to this
stranger my reasons for not caring to converse with
Mary Lockwood. I also remembered that the situa-
tion confronting me was something which should
transcend mere personal issues. And I was in a quan-
dary, until I thought of the ever-dependable Benson.

"I'll have my man call up Lockwood's house," I
explained as I rose to my feet, "and announce that we're
making an informal visit to those offices."

"But what's that visit for?"

"For the purpose of finding out if John Lockwood
really taps his thumbs or not!"

The gray-faced youth stared at me.

"But what good will that do?" he demanded.

"Why, it'll give us the right stage-setting, the right

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 305

'props' — something to reach out and grope along. It'll
mean the same to your imagination as a brick wall to
a bit of ivy." And I stopped and turned to give my
instructions to Benson.

"Oh, it's no earthly use!" repeated the man who
couldn't remember, in his flat and atonic voice. But in-
stead of answering or arguing with him I put his hat
in his hand and held the portiere, waiting for him to
pass through.

I have often thought that if the decorous and some-
what ponderous figure of Mr. John Lockwood had in-
vaded his own offices on that particular night, he would
have been persuaded of the fact that he was confront-
ing two madmen.

For, once we had gained access to those offices and
locked the door behind us, I began over again what I
had so inadequately attempted in my own library.

During the earlier part of my effort to Belascoize a
slumbering mental idea into some approximation to
life, I tried to remember my surroundings and the fact
that the hour was the unseemly one of almost two
o'clock in the morning. But as I seated Criswell at
his own office desk and did my utmost to galvanize
his tired brain into some semblance of the role T had
laid out for it, I think he rather lost track of time and
place. At the end of ten minutes my face was moist
with sweat, and a wave of utter exhaustion swept
through me as I saw that, after all my struggle, noth-
ing in that minutely enacted little drama had struck
a responsive chord in either his imagination or his
memory.

306 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"You don't get anything?" I asked as I dropped back
into a chair at the end of my pantomime. No stage-
manager, trying to project his personality into an un-
responding actor, could have struggled more passion-
ately, more persuasively, more solicitously. But it
had been fruitless.

"No, I can't get anything!" said the white-faced
Criswell. And I could see that he had honestly tried,
that he had strained his very soul, striving to reach up
to the light that was denied him. But the matter was
not one of mere volition. It was beyond his power.
It depended on something external, on something as
much outside his conscious control as though it were
an angel that must come and touch him on the brow.
It was simply that the door of Memory remained locked
and barred. We had not hit upon the right combina-
tion. But I did not give up.

"Now we're going in to try Lockwood's own office,"
I told him, with a peremptoriness which made him draw
away from me.

"I — I don't think I can go through it again," he
faltered. And I could see the lines of mental fatigue
deepen on his ashen face.

Yet I proffered him no sympathy ; I allowed him no
escape from those four imprisoning walls. I had al-
ready stirred the pool too deeply. I knew that a re-
lapse into the old impassive hopelessness would now
be doubly perilous.

I looked about the room. Three sides of it were
lined with book-shelves and every shelf was filled with
hundreds of books, thousands of them altogether, from

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 307

dull and uninteresting-looking treatises on railway
building and mining engineering to even more dull-
looking consular reports and text-books on matters of
finance. The fourth side of the room held two win-
dows. Between these windows, some six feet from
the wall, stood Lockwood's rosewood desk. It was a
handsome desk, heavily carved, yet like the rest of the
furniture, the acme of simplicity. History, I knew,
had been made over that oblong of rosewood. It had
been and would again be an arena of Napoleonic con-
tention. Yet it stood before me as bare and bald as
a prize fighter's platform.

I sat down in the carved swivel chair beside this
desk, drew my chair closer to the rosewood, and looked
up at Criswell, who, I believe, would have turned and
bolted, had he been given the chance. He was, I fancy,
even beginning to have suspicions as to my sanity.
But in that I saw no objection. It was, I felt, rather
an advantage. It would serve to key his nerves up
to a still higher pitch — for I still hoped against hope
that I might lash him into some form of mental calen-
ture which would drive him into taking the high jump,
which would in some way make him clear the blind
wall.

"Now, I'm Lockwood, remember," I cried, fixing
my eye on him, "and you're Criswell, my private sec-
retary. Have you got that plain?"

He did not answer me. He was, apparently, looking
weakly about for a place to sit down.

"Have you got that plain?" I repeated, this time in a
voice that was almost thunderous.

3o8 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Yes," he finally said. "I understand."

"Then go back into your room there. From that
room I want you to bring me a letter. Not any old
letter, but one particular letter. I want you to bring
me the Carlton registered letter which you signed for.
I want you to see it, and feel it, and bring it here."

i threw all the authority of my being into that com-
mand. I had to justify both my course and my intelli-
gence. I had to get my man over the high jump, or
crawl away humiliated and defeated.

I stared at the man, for he was not moving. I tried
to cow him into obedience by the very anger of my
look. But it didn't seem to succeed.

"Don't you understand," I cried. "I want you to
bring that registered letter in to me, here, now !"

He looked at me a little blankly. Then he passed
his hand over his moist forehead.

"But we tried that before," he falteringly com-
plained. "We tried that, and it wouldn't work. I
brought the letter in the first time, and you weren't
here."

I sat up as though I had been shot. I could feel a
tingle of something go up and down my backbone.
My God, I thought, the man's actually stumbling on
something. The darkness was delivering itself of
an idea.

"Yes, we tried that before," I wheedled. "And
what happened?"

"You weren't here," he repeated, in tones of such
languid detachment that one might have thought of
him as under the influence of a hypnotist.

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 309

"But I'm here now, so bring me the letter!"

I tried to speak quietly, but I noticed that my voice
shook with suppressed excitement. Whether or not
the contagion of my hysteria went out to him I can
not say. But he suddenly walked out of the room, with
the utmost solemnity.

The moment I was alone I did a thing that was both
ridiculous and audacious. Jerking open Lockwood's
private drawer, I caught up a perfecto from a cigar-
box I found there. This perfecto I impertinently and
promptly lighted, puffing its aroma about, for it had
suddenly come home to me how powerful an aid to
memory certain odors may be, how, for instance, the
mere smell of a Noah's Ark will carry a man forty
years back to a childhood Giristmas.

I sat there busily and abstractedly smoking as Cris-
well came into the room and quietly stepped up to my
desk. In his hand he carried a letter. He was solemn
enough about it, only his eyes, I noticed, were as empty
as though he were giving an exhibition of sleep-walk-
ing. He reminded me of a hungry actor trying to look
happy over a papier-mache turkey.

"Here's a letter for Carlton, sir," he said to me.
"Had I better send it on, or will you look after it?"

I pretended to be preoccupied. Lockwood, I felt,
would have been that way, if the scene had indeed
ever occurred. Lockwood's own mind must have been
busy, otherwise he would have carried away some
definite memory of what had happened.

I looked up, quickly and irritably. I took the let-
ter from Cris well's hand, glanced at it, and began

310 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

absently tapping my left thumb-tip with it as I peered
at the secretarial figure before me.

Crisw ell's face went blank as he saw the movement.
It was now not even somnambulistic in intelligence. It
maddened me to think he was going to fail me at such
a critical moment.

"What are you breaking down for?" I cried. "Why
don't you go on?"

He was silent, looking ahead of him.

"I — / see blue," he finally said, as though to himself.
His face was clammy with sweat.

"What sort of blue?" I prompted. "Blue cloth?
Blue sky? Blue ink? Blue w h at?"

"It's blue," he repeated, ignoring my interruption.
And all his soul seemed writhing and twisting in some
terrible travail of mental childbirth.

"I see blue. And you're making it white. You're
covering it up. You're turning over white — white —
white! Oh, what in God's name is it?"

My spine was again tingling with a thousand elec-
tric needles as I watched him. He turned to me with
a gesture of piteous appeal.

"What was it?" he implored. "Can't you help me
get it — get it before it goes! What was it?"

"It was blue, blue and white," I told him, and as
I said it I realized what madhouse jargon it would have
sounded to any outsider.

He sank into a chair, and let his head fall forward
on his hands. He did not speak for several seconds.

"And there are two hills covered with snow-" he
slowly intoned.

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 311

My heart sank a little as I heard him. I knew I
had overtaxed his strength. He was wandering off
again into irrelevancies. He had missed the high
jump.

"That's all right, old man," I tried to console him.
"There's no use overdoing this. You sit there for a.
while and calm down."

As I sank into a chair on the other side of the desk,,
defeated, staring wearily about that book-lined room
that was housing so indeterminate a tragedy, the door
on my left was thrown open. Through it stepped a
woman in an ivory-tinted dinner gown over which
was thrown a cloth-of-gold cloak.

I sat there blinking up at her, for it was Mary Lock-
wood herself. It was not so much her sudden appear-
ance as the words she spoke to the huddled figure oil
the other side of the desk that startled me.

"You were right," she said, with a self-obliterating
intensity of purpose. "Father taps his thumbs. I saw
him do it an hour ago!"

I sat staring at her as she stood in the center of the
room, a tower of ivory and gold against the dull and
mottled colors of the book-lined wall. I waited for
her to speak. Then out of the mottled colors that
confronted my eye, out of the faded yellows and rusty
browns, the dull greens and brighter reds, and the gilt
of countless titles, my gaze rested on a near-by oblong
of blue.

I looked at it without quite seeing it. Then it came
capriciously home to me that blue had been the color
that Criswell had mentioned.

U2 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

But after all blue is only blue, I vacuously told my-
self as I got up and crossed the room. Then I saw
the white streak at the top of the book, and for no
adequate reason my heart suddenly leaped up into my
throat.

I snatched at that thing of blue and white, like a
man overboard snatching at a life-line. I jerked it
from its resting-place and crossed to the desk-top
with it.

On its blue title page I read : "Report of the Com-
missioner of the North West Mounted Police, 1898."

The volume, I could see at a glance, was a Canadian
Government Blue Book. It was a volume which I my-
self had exploited, in my own time, and for my own
ends. But those ends, I remembered as I took up the
book and shook it, belonged now to a world that seemed
very foolish and very far-away. Then, having shaken
the volume as a terrier shakes a rat, I turned it over
and looked through it. This I did with a slowly sink-
ing heart.

It held nothing of significance. Yet I took it up
and shook it and riffled through its leaves once more,
to make sure. Then between what I saw to be the
eighteenth and nineteenth pages of that section which
bore the title 'The Report of Inspector Moodie," I
came upon a photographic insert, a tint-block photo-
engraving. It carried the inscription: "The Summit
of Laurier Pass Looking Westward." What made
me suddenly stop breathing was the fact that this
photograph showed two hills covered with snow.

"Criswell!" I called out, so sharply that it must

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 313

have sounded like a scream to the bewildered woman
in the cloth-of-gold cloak.

"Yes," he answered in his far-away voice.

"Was John Lockwood ever interested in Northern
British Columbia? Did he happen to have any claims
or interests or plans that would make him look up
trails in a Police Patrol report?"

"I don't know," was the wearily indifferent answer.

"Think, man !" I called out at him. "Think!"

"I can't think," he complained.

"Wouldn't he have to look up roads to a new mining-
camp in that district?" I persisted.

"Yes, I think he did," was the slow response. Then
the speaker looked up at me. His stupor was almost
that of intoxication. His wandering eye peered un<
steadily down at the Blue Book as I once more riffled
through its pages, from back to front. I saw his
wavering glance grow steady, his whole face change.
I put the book down on the desk-top, with the picture
of Laurier Pass uppermost under the flat white light.

I saw the man's eyes gradually dilate, and his body
rise, as though some unseen hydraulic machinery were
slowly and evenly elevating it.

"Why, there's the blue! There's the white!" he
gasped.

"Go on!" I cried. "Goon!"

"And those are the two hills covered with snow!
That's it ! I see it ! I see it, now ! That's the book John
Lockwood was going through when I handed him
the letter!"

"What letter?" I insisted.

314 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Carlton's letter," he proclaimed.

"Then where is it ?" I asked, sick at heart. I looked
from Criswell to the girl in the gold cloak as she
crossed the room to the book-shelf and stooped over
the space from which I had so feverishly snatched the
Blue Book. I saw her brush the dust from her finger-
tips, stoop lower, and again reach in between the
shelves. Then I looked back at Criswell, for I could
hear his voice rise almost to a scream.

"I remember! I see it now! And he's got to re-
member! He's got to remember!"

1 shook my head, hopelessly, as he flung himself
down in the chair, sobbing out that foolish cry, over
and over again.

"Yes, he's got to remember," I could hear Mary
Lockwood say as she turned and faced us.

"But what will make him?" I asked, as her studious-
ly impersonal gaze met mine.

"This will," she announced as she held out her
hand. I saw then, for the first time, that in this hand
she was holding a heavily inscribed and R-stamped
envelope.

"What's that?" demanded Criswell, staring hard.

"It's your lost letter," answered Mary Lockwood.
"How it fell out, I don't know. But we do know, now,
that father shut this letter up in that book. And the
Lockwoods, I'm afraid," she continued with an odd
little quaver in her voice, "will have a very, very
great deal to ask your forgiveness for. I'm sorry, Mr.
Criswell, terribly sorry this ever happened. But I'm

THE THUMB-TAP CLUE 315

glad, terribly glad, that it has turned out the way it
has."

There was a moment of quite unbroken silence. Then
Criswell turned to me.

"It's you I've got to thank for all this," he finally
blustered out, with moist yet happy eyes, as he did
his best to wring my hand off. "It's you who've —
who've reinstated me !"

We were standing there in a sort of triangle, very
awkward and ill-at-ease, until I found the courage to
break the silence.

"But I don't seem to have been able to reinstate
myself, Criswell," I said as I turned and met Mary
Lockwood's level gaze. She looked at me out of those
intrepid and unequivocating eyes of hers, for a full
half minute. Then she turned slowly away. She
didn't speak. But there was something that looked
strangely like unhappiness in her face as she groped
toward the door, which Criswell, I noticed, opened
for her.

CHAPTER XI

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER

44T HOPE you slept well, sir," said Benson, as I sat

•■■ down to my breakfast of iced Casaba and eggs
O'Brien, a long month later.

"Like a top, thank you," I was able to announce to
that anxious-eyed old retainer of mine.

"That sounds like old times, sir," ventured Benson,
caressing his own knuckle-joints very much as though
he were shaking hands with himself.

"It feels like old times," I briskly acknowledged.
"And this morning, Benson, I'd like you to clear
out my study and get that clutter of Shang and Ming
bronzes off my writing-desk."

"Very good, sir."

"And order up a ream or two of that Wistaria Bond
I used to use. For I feel like work again, Benson,
and that's a feeling which I don't think we ought to
neglect."

"Quite so, sir," acquiesced Benson, with an approv-
ing wag of the head which he made small effort to
conceal.

It was the truth that I had spoken to Benson. The
drought seemed to have ended. The old psychasthenic
inertia had slipped away. Life, for some unaccountable
reason or other, still again seemed wonderful to me,
touched with some undefined promise of high adven-

316

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 317

ture, crowned once more with the fugitive wine-glow
of romance. Gramercy Square, from my front win-
dows, looked like something that Maxfield Parrish
might have drawn. A milk-wagon, just beyond the
corner, made me suddenly think of Phaethon and his
coursers of the stellar trails. I felt an itching to get
back to my desk, to shake out the wings of creation.
I wanted to write once more. It would never again
be about those impossible Alaskan demigods of the
earlier days, but about real men and women, about
the people I had met and known and struggled into
an understanding of. Life, I began to feel, was a game,
a great game, a game well worth watching, doubly
well worth trying to interpret.

So when I settled down that day I wrote feverishly
and I wrote joyously. I wrote until my fingers were
cramped and my head was empty. I surrendered to a
blithe logorrhea that left me contentedly limp and lax
and in need of an hour or two of open air.

So I sallied forth, humming as I went. It was a
sparkling afternoon of earliest spring, and as I paced
the quiet streets I turned pleasantly over in that half-
torpid brain of mine certain ideas as to the value of
dramatic surprise, together with a carefully regis-
tered self-caution as to the author's over-use of the
long arm of Coincidence.

Coincidences, I told myself, were things which
popped up altogether too often on the printed page,
and occurred altogether too seldom in actual life. It
was a lazy man's way of reaching his end, that trick of

3iS THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

riding the bumpers of Invention, of swinging and dan-
gling from the over-wrenched arm-socket of Coinci-
dence. It was good enough for the glib and delusive
coggery of the moving-pictures, but —

And then I stopped short. I stopped short, con-
fronted by one of those calamitous street-accidents
only too common in any of our twentieth-century
cities where speed and greed have come to weigh life
so lightly.

I scarcely know which I noticed first, the spick-and-
span cloverleaf roadster sparkling in its coat of Nile-
green enamel, or the girl who seemed to step directly
in its path as it went humming along the smooth and
polished asphalt. But by one of those miraculously
rapid calculations of which the human mind is quite
often capable I realized that this same softly-hum-
ming car was predestined to come more or less vio-
lently into contact with that frail and seemingly hesi-
tating figure.

My first impulse was to turn away, to avoid a
spectacle which instinct told me would be horrible.
For still again I felt the beak of cowardice spearing
my vitals. I had the odynephobiac's dread of blood.
It unmanned me; it sickened my soul. And I would
at least have covered my face with my hands, to blot
out the scene, had I not suddenly remembered that
other and strangely similar occasion when a car came
into violent collision with a human body. And it had
been my car. On that occasion, I only too well knew,
I had proved unpardonably vacillating and craven. I
had run away from the horror I should have faced

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 319

like a man. And I had paid for my cowardice, paid
for it at the incredibly extortionate price of my
self-respect and my peace of mind.

So this time I compelled myself to face the music.
I steeled myself to stand by, even as the moving car
struck the hesitating body and threw it to the pave-
ment. My heart jumped up into my throat, like a
ball-valve, and I shouted aloud, in mortal terror, for
I could see where the skirted body trailed in under the
running-gear of the Nile-green roadster, dragging
along the pavement as the two white hands clung
frantically to the green-painted spring-leaves. But I
didn't run away. Instead of running away, in fact, I
did exactly the opposite. I swung out to the side of
the fallen girl, who stiffened in my arms as I picked her
up. Then I spread my overcoat out along the curb,
and placed the inert body on top of it, for in my first
unreasoning panic I assumed that the woman was dead.
I could see salivia streaked with blood drooling from
her parted lips. It was horrible. And I had just made
sure that she was still alive, that she was still breath-
ing, when I became conscious of the fact that a second
man, who had run along beside the car shaking his
fist up at its driver, was standing close beside me. He
was an elderly man, a venerable-looking man, a man
with silvery hair and a meek and threadbare aspect.
He was wringing his hands and moaning in his mis-
ery as he stared down at the girl stretched out on my
overcoat.

"They've killed her!" he cried aloud. "O God,
they've killed her!"

320 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"Do you know this girl ?" I demanded as I did my
best to loosen the throat of her shirt-waist.

"Yes — yes! She's my Babbie. She's my niece.
She's all I have," was his reply. "But they've killed
her."

"Acting that way won't help things !" I told him, al-
most angrily. Then I looked up, still angrily, to see
what had become of the Nile-green car. It had drawn
in close beside the curb, not thirty feet away. I could
see a woman stepping down from the driving-seat. All
I noticed, at first, was that her face seemed very white,
and that as she turned and moved toward us her left
hand was pressed tight against her breast. It struck
me, even in that moment of tension, as an indescrib-
ably dramatic gesture.

Then the long arm of the goddess known as Coin-
cidence swung up and smote me full in the face, as
solidly as a blacksmith's hammer smites an anvil.
For the woman I saw walking white-faced yet de-
termined toward where I knelt at the curb-side was
Mary Lockwood herself.

I stood up and faced her in the cruel clarity of the
slanting afternoon sunlight. For only a moment, I
noticed, her stricken eyes rested on the figure of the
woman lying along the curb-edge. Then they rose
to my face. In those eyes, as she stared at me, I
could read the question, the awful question, which her
lips left unuttered. Yet it was not fear; it was not
cowardice, that I saw written on that tragically color-
less brow. It was more a dumb protest against in-
justice without bounds, a passionate and unarticulated

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 321

pleading for some delivering sentence which she knew
could not be given to her.

"No, she's not dead," I said in answer to that un-
spoken question. "She may not even be seriously
hurt. But—"

I stared down at the telltale saliva streaked with
blood. But the silvery-haired old man at my side put
an end to any such efforts at prevarication.

"She's killed," he excitedly proclaimed.

"She's no such thing," I just as excitedly retorted.

"But you saw what they did to her?" he demanded,
clutching at my shoulder. "You saw it. They ran
her down, like a dog. They've ruined her; they've
broken her body, for life!"

I could see Mary Lockwood's hand go out, as though
in search for support. She was breathing almost as
quickly, by this time, as the reviving girl on the
curb-edge.

"Shut up," I curtly commanded the old man as he
started in once more on his declamations, for the cus-
tomary city crowd was already beginning to cluster
about us. "It isn't talk we want now. We must get
this girl where she can be taken care of."

It was then that Mary Lockwood spoke for the first
time. Her voice was tremulous, but the gloved hand
that hung at her side was no longer shaking.

"Couldn't I take her home?" she asked me. "To
my home?"

I was busy pushing back the crowd.

"No," I told her, "a hospital's best. I'll put her in
your car there. Then you run her over to the Roose-

322 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

velt. That's even better than waiting for an am-
bulance."

I stooped over the injured girl again and felt her
pulse. It struck me as an amazingly strong and
steady pulse for any one in such a predicament. And
her respiration, I noticed, was very close to normal. I
examined each side of her face, and inspected her
lips and even her tongue-tip, to see if some cut or
abrasion there couldn't account for that disturbing
streak of blood. But I could find neither cut nor
bruise, and by this time the old man was again mak-
ing himself heard.

"You'll take her to no pest-house," he was ex-
citedly proclaiming. "She'll come home with me —
what's left of her. She must come home with me!"

Mary Lockwood stared at him with her tragic and
still slightly bewildered eyes.

"Very well," she quietly announced. "I'll take her
home. I'll take you both home."

And at this the old man seemed immensely re-
lieved.

"Where is it you want to go?" I rather impatiently
demanded of him. For I'd decided to get them away
from there, for Mary's sake, before the inevitable pa-
trolman or reporter happened along.

"On the other side of Brooklyn," explained the
bereft one, with a vague hand-wave toward the east.
I had to push back the crowd again, before I was able
to gather the limp form up from its asphalted resting-
place.

"And what's your name?" I demanded as the old

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 323

man came shuffling along beside us on our way to the
waiting car.

"Crotty," he announced. "Zachary Crotty."

It wasn't until I'd placed the injured girl in the
softly-upholstered car-seat that that name of "Crotty,"
sent like a torpedo across the open spaces of distrac-
tion, exploded against the hull-plates of memory.

Crotty ! The very name of Crotty took my thoughts
suddenly winging back to yet another street-accident,
an accident in which I myself had figured so actively
and so unfortunately. For Crotty was the name of the
man, I remembered, who had confirmed my chauffeur
Latreille's verdict as to the victim of that never-to-be-
forgotten Hallow-e'en affair. Crotty was the indi-
vidual who had brought word to Latreille that we had
really killed a man. And Crotty was not a remarkably
common name. And now, oddly enough, he was figur-
ing in another accident of almost the same nature.

Something prompted me to reach in and feel the
hand of the still comatose girl. That hand, I noticed,
was warm to the touch. Then I turned and inspected
the venerable-looking old man who was now weeping
volubly into a large cotton handkerchief.

"You'll have to give us your street and number,"
I told him, as a mask to cover that continued inspec-
tion of mine.

He did so, between sobs. And as he did so I failed
to detect any trace of actual tears on his face. What
was more, I felt sure that the eye periodically con-
cealed by the noisily-flourished handkerchief was a
chronically roving eye, an unstable eye, an eye that

324 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

seemed averse to meeting your own honestly inquiring
glance.

That discovery, or perhaps I ought to say that sus-
picion, caused me to turn to Mary, who was already in
her place in the driving-seat.

"Wouldn't it be bettei if I went with you?" I asked
her, stung to the heart by the mute suffering which
I could only too plainly see on her milk-white face.

"No," she told me as she motioned for the girl's
uncle to climb into the car. "This is something I've
got to do myself."

"And it's something that'll have to be paid for,
and well paid for," declaimed our silvery-haired old
friend as he stowed away his cotton handkerchief and
took up his slightly triumphant position in that Nile-
green roadster.

It was not so much this statement, I think, as the
crushed and hopeless look in Mary Lockwood's eyes
that prompted me to lean in across the car-door and
meet the gaze of those eyes as they stared so un-
seeinsLv down at me.

"I wish you'd let me go with you," I begged, put-
ting my pride in my pocket.

"What good would that do ?" she demanded, with a
touch of bitterness in her voice. Her foot, I could see,
was already pressing down on the starter-knob.

"I might be able to help you," I rather inadequately
ventured. Even as I spoke, however, I caught sight
of the blue-clad figure of a patrolman pushing his
way through the crowd along the curb. I imagine
that Mary also caught sight of that figure, for a shadow

THE XILE-GREEN ROADSTER

o-o

passed across her face and the pulse of the engine in-
creased to a drone.

"I can't wait," she said in a sort of guilty gasp.
"This girl needs help. And she needs it quickly."

Unconsciously my eyes fell to the other girl sitting
back so limply in the padded seat. She was, clearly,
coming round again. But as she drifted past my
line of vision with the movement of the car I made a
trivial and yet a slightly perplexing discovery. I
noticed that the relaxed hand posed so impassively
along the door-top bore a distinct yellow stain be-
tween the tips of the first and second fingers. That
yellow stain, I knew, was customarily brought about
by the use of cigarettes. It was a mark peculiar to
the habitual smoker. Yet the meek and drab-colored
figure that I had lifted into that car-seat could scarcely
be accepted as a consumer of "coffin-nails." It left
a wrinkle which the iron of Reason found hard to eradi-
cate.

It left me squinting after that departing roadster, in
fact, with something more than perplexity nibbling at
my heart. I was oppressed by a feeling of undefined
conspiracies weaving themselves about the tragic-eyed
girl in the Nile-green car. And a sudden ache to fol-
low after that girl, to stand between her and certain
activities which she could never comprehend, took pos-
session of me.

Any such pursuit, however, was not as easy as it
promised. For I first had to explain to that inquiring
patrolman that the accident had been a trivial one, that
I hadn't even bothered about taking the license-number

326 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

of the car, and that I could be found at my home in
Gramercy Square in case any further information
might be deemed necessary. Then, once clear of the
neighborhood, I hesitated between two possible
courses. One was to get in touch with Mary's father
over the phone, with John Lockwood. The other was
to hurry down to Police Headquarters and talk things
over with my good friend Lieutenant Belton. But
either movement, I remembered, would have stood dis-
tasteful to Mary herself. It meant publicity, and pub-
licity was one thing to be avoided. So I solved the
problem by taking an altogether different tack. I
did what deep down in my heart I had been wanting to
do all along. I hailed a passing taxicab, hopped in,
and made straight for that hinterland district of
Brooklyn where Crotty had described his home as
standing.

I didn't drive directly to that home, but dismissed
my driver at a near-by corner and approached the
house on foot. There was no longer any Nile-green
car in sight. And the house itself, I noticed, was a
distinctly unattractive-looking one, a shabby one, even
a sordid one. I stood in the shadow of the side-
entrance to one of those gilt-lettered corner-saloons
which loom like aromatic oases out of man's most
dismal Saharas, studying that altogether repellent
house- front. And as I stood there making careful note
of its minutest characteristics a figure came briskly
down its broken sandstone steps.

What made me catch my breath, however, was the
fact that the figure was that of a man, and the man

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 327

was Latreille, my ex-chauffeur. And still again, I
remembered, the long arm of Coincidence was reach-
ing out and plucking me by the sleeve.

But I didn't linger there to meditate over this ab-
straction, for I noticed that Latreille, sauntering along
the opposite side of the street, had signaled to two
other men leisurely approaching my caravansary from
the near-by corner. One of these, I saw, was the old
man known as Crotty. And it was obvious that within
two minutes' time they would converge somewhere dis-
agreeably close to the spot where I stood.

So I backed discreetly and quietly through the side-
entrance of that many-odored beer-parlor. There I
encountered an Hibernian bartender with an empty tray
and an exceptionally evil eye. I detained him, however,
with a fraternal hand on his sleeve.

"Sister," I hurriedly explained, "I've got a date
with a rib here. Can you put me under cover ?"

It was patois, I felt sure, which would reach his
understanding. But it wasn't until he beheld the five-
spot which I'd slid up on his tray that the look of
world-weary cynicism vanished from his face.

"Sure," he said as he promptly and impassively
pocketed the bill. Then without a word or the blink
of an eye he pushed in past a room crowded with
round tables on iron pedestals, took the key out of a
door opening in the rear wall, thrust it into my fingers,
and offhandedly motioned me inside.

I stepped in through that door and closed and locked
it. Then I inspected my quarters. They were elo-
quent enough of sordid and ugly adventure. They

328 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

smelt of sour liquor and stale cigar-smoke, with a
vague over-tone of orris and patchouli. On one side
of the room was an imitation Turkish couch, on the
other an untidy washstand and a charred-edged card-
table. Half-way between these there was a "speak-
easy," a small sliding wall-panel through which liquid
refreshments might be served without any undue inter-
ruption to the privacy of those partaking of the same.
This speak-easy, I noticed as I slid it back the merest
trifle, opened on the "beer parlor," at the immediate
rear of the bar-room itself, the "parlor" where the
thirsty guest might sit at one of the little round tables
and consume his "suds" or his fusel-oil whisky at his
leisure. And the whole place impressed me as the
sort of thing that still made civilization a mockery and
suburban recreation a viper that crawled on its belly.

I was, in fact, still peering through my little speak-
easy slit in the wall when I became conscious of the
three figures that came sidling into that empty room
with the little round tables. I could see them distinct-
ly. There was the silvery-haired old Crotty ; there was
Latreille ; and there was a rather unkempt and furtive-
eyed individual who very promptly and unmistakably
impressed me as a drug-addict. And repugnant as
eavesdropping was to me, I couldn't help leaning close
to my speak-easy crevice and listening to that worthy
trio as they seated themselves within six feet of where
I stood, Latreille and old Crotty with their backs to
me, the untidy individual whom they addressed as
The Doc sitting facing the wall that shielded me.

"Swell kipping!" contentedly murmured one of

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 329

that trio, out of their momentary silence. And at
that I promptly pricked up my ears, for I knew that
swell kipping in the vernacular of the underworld
stood for easy harvesting.

"What'll it be, boys?" interrupted a voice which I
recognized as the bartender's.

"Bourbon," barked Latreille.

"A slug o' square-face, Mickey," companionably
announced the old gentleman known as Crotty.

"Deep beer," sighed he who was designated as The
Doc. Then came the sound of a match being struck,
the scrape of a chair-leg, and the clump of a fist on
the table-top, followed by a quietly contented laugh.

"It's a pipe!" announced a solemnly exultant voice.
And I knew the speaker to be my distinguished ex-
chauffeur. "It's sure one grand little cinch!"

"Nothing's a cinch until you get the goods in your
jeans," contended Crotty, with the not unnatural skep-
ticism of age.

"But didn't she hand her hundred and ten over
to The Doc, just to cover running-expenses? Ain't
that worth rememberin'? And ain't she got the fear
o' Gawd thrown into her? And ain't she comin' back
to-night wit' that wine-jelly and old Port and her own
check-book ?"

This allocution was followed by an appreciative
silence.

"But it's old Lockwood who's got o' come across,"
that individual known as The Doc finally reminded
his confreres.

This brought a snort of contempt from Latreille.

330 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"I tell you again old Lockwood'll fight you to the
drop of the hat. The girl's your meat. She's your
mark. You've got her! And if you've only got the
brains to milk her right she's good for forty thou-
sand. She's weakened already. She's on the skids.
And she's got a pile of her own to pull from !"

"Forty thousand?" echoed the other, with a smack
of the lips.

"That's thirteen thousand a-piece," amended La-
treille largely, "with one over for Car-Step Sadie."
"Cut out that name," commanded Crotty.
"Well, Babbie then, if that suits you better. And
it's a landslide for her!"

"Ain't she earned it?" demanded her silvery-haired
old guardian.

"Strikes me as being pretty good pay for gettin'
bunted over with a play-car and not even a shin-
bruise."

"Well, ain't her trainin' worth something, in this
work?"

"Sure it is — but how 'n hell did she get that blood
streakin' across her face so nice and life-like ?"

The silvery-haired old gentleman chuckled as he
put down his glass of square-face.

"That's sure our Babbie's one little grand-stand
play! You see, she keeps the pulp exposed in one o'
her back teeth. Then a little suck with her tongue over
it makes it bleed, on a half-minute notice. That's
how she worked the hemorrhage-game with old
Bronchial Bill all last winter, before the beak sent
him up the river."

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 331

I stood there, leaning against the soiled shelf across
which must have passed so much of the liquid that
cheers depressed humanity. But never before, I feel
sure, did anything quite so cheering come through
that sordid little speak-easy. I was no longer afraid
of that malignant-looking trio so contentedly exult-
ing over their ill-gotten victory.

"Well, it's a cinch," went on the droning voice, "if
The Doc'll only cut out the dope for a couple o' days
and your Babbie doesn't get to buckin' over the foot-
board!"

"It ain't Babbie I'm worryin' over," explained old
Crotty. "That girl'll do what's expected of her.
She's got to. I've wised her up on that. What's
worryin' me more is that cuff-shooter who butted in
over there on the Island."

Still again I could hear Latreille's little snort of
open contempt.

"Well, you can put that bug out of your head,"
quietly averred my ex-chauffeur. "You seem to 've
forgotten that guy, Zachy. That's the boob we un-
loaded the Senator's town car on. And that's the
Hindoo I framed, away back on Hallow-e'en Night.
You remember that, don't you ?"

I leaned closer, with my heart pounding under my
midriff and a singing in my ears. But old Crotty didn't
seem to remember.

"On Hallow-e'en Night?" he ruminated aloud.

"Why, the stiff I asked you to stand ready to give
the glad word to, if he happened round for any habeas-
corpus song and dance!" prompted the somewhat im-

332 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

patient voice of Latreille. "Don't you mind, back on
last Hallow-e'en, how the Big Hill boys stuffed that
suit of old clothes with straw and rags, and then
stuck it up in the street ? And how we hit that dummy,
and how I made the chicken-hearted pen-wiper think
that he'd killed a man and coyoted off the scene?"

I don't know what old Crotty's reply to those ques-
tions were. I wasn't interested in his reply. It wasn't
even rage that swept through me as I stood listening
to those only too enraging words.

The first thing that I felt was a sense of relief, a
vague yet vast consciousness of deliverance, like a
sleepy lifer with a governor's pardon being waved
in his face. I was no longer afraid for Mary. I
was no longer afraid of life, afraid of myself, afraid
of my fellows. My slate was clean. And above all,
I was in no way any longer afraid of Latreille. /
was the chicken-hearted pen-wiper — and I hated him
for that word — who had been "framed." / was the
over-timorous victim of their sweet-scented conspi-
racies. / was the boob who had been made to shuffle
and suffer and sweat. But that time was over and
done with, forever. And the great wave of relief
that swept through me surged back again, this time
crested with anger, and then still again towered and
broke in a misty rush of pity for Mary Lockwood.
I thought of her as something soft and feathered in
the triple coils of those three reptilious conspirators,
as something clean and timid and fragile, being slowly
slathered over by the fangs which were to fasten them-
selves upon her innocence, which were to feed upon

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 333

her goodness of heart. And I decided that she would
never have to go through what I had been compelled
to go through.

I didn't wait for more. There was, in fact, noth-
ing more to wait for, so far as I and my world were
concerned. I had found out all I wanted to find out.
Yet I had to stand there for a full minute, coercing
myself to calmness. Then I tiptoed across the room
to a second door which stood in the rear wall, un-
locked it, and stepped out into the narrow and none
too well-lighted hallway. This led to a washroom
which in turn opened on another narrow passageway.
And from this I was able to circle back into the bar-
room itself.

I didn't tarry to make any explanations to the
worthy called Mickey, or to advertise my exit to his
even worthier friends. I slipped quietly and quickly
out of that unclean street-corner fester-spot, veered
off across the street where the early spring twilight
was already settling down, and went straight to the
house which I knew to be Crotty's.

I didn't even wait to ring. I tried the door, found
it unlocked, and stepped inside. There, no sign of
life confronted me. But that didn't for a moment
deter my explorations. I quietly investigated the
ground floor, found it as unprepossessing as its pro-
prietor, and proceeded noiselessly up the narrow stair-
way for an examination of the upper regions.

It wasn't until I reached the head of the stairs that
I came to a stop. For there I could hear the muffled
but unmistakable sound of somebody moving about.

334 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

It took me several minutes to determine the source
of these movements. But once I had made sure of my
ground I advanced to the door at the back of the half-
darkened hall and swung it open.

On the far side of the room into which I stood star-
ing I saw a girl in house-slippers and a faded rose-
colored peignoir thrown over a none too clean night-
dress of soiled linen. In one hand she held a lighted
cigarette. With the other hand she was stirring some-
thing in a small graniteware stew-pan over a gas-
heater. Her hair was down and her shoulders were
bare. But all her attention seemed concentrated on
that savory stew, which she sniffed at hungrily, almost
childishly, between puffs on her cigarette. Then she
fell to stirring her pot again, with obvious satisfaction.

I had the door shut behind me, in fact, before she
so much as surmised that any one else was in the room
with her. And when she looked up and saw me there
her eyes slowly widened and she slowly and deliber-
atelv put her spoon down on the soiled dresser-top
beside her. It wasn't exactly fear that I saw creep
into her face. It was more the craft of the long-harried
and case-hardened fugitive.

"Bab,'7 I said, addressing her in the language which
I imagined would most forcibly appeal to her. "I
don't want to butt in on your slough. But time's
precious and I'm going to talk plain."

"Shoot!" she said after a moment of hesitation fol-
lowed by another moment of silent appraisal.

"The cops are rounding up The Doc and old Crotty
for claim faking. They're also coming here, Bab, to

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 335

gather up a girl called Car-Step Sadie for dummy-
chucking under the car of that Lockwood woman and
bleeding: her for one hundred and ten bones, and — "

"Those bulls 've got nuttin' on me !" broke out the
disturbingly dishabille figure in soiled linen, as she
stood staring at me with a sort of mouse-like hostility
in her crafty young eyes.

"But they're bringing a police-surgeon along with
'em," I went glibly on, "for they claim, Bab, you've
got a hollow tooth you can start bleeding any time
you need to stall on that internal-injury stuff. And
they've dug up a couple of cases that aren't going to
sound any too good over in the District Attorney's
office. Now, I'm not here to give advice. This is
merely a rumble. And you can do what you like about
it. But if you're wise, you'll slide while the sliding
is good."

She stood once more silently studying me.

"What's all this to yuh, anyway?" she suddenly de-
manded.

"It's so little, my dear," I airily acknowledged, "that
you can do exactly as you like about it. But — "

"Where's The Doc?" was her next quick question.
"Where's Crotty?"

I had to think fast.

"They've ducked," I asserted, amazed at my own
newly-discovered facility in fictioneering.

"Who said they'd ducked ?"

"Do you know Mickey's, over there on the corner?"
I ventured.

She nodded as she darted across the room and

336 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

threw aside the faded peignoir. The movement made
my thoughts flash back to another and earlier scene,
to the scene wherein one Vinnie Brunelle had played
the leading- role.

"Latreille," I explained to the girl across the room,
"dropped in at Mickey's and tipped Crotty and The
Doc off, not more than a quarter of an hour ago."

"And they rabbited off wit' out throwin' me a sign?"
she indignantly demanded.

"They did," I prevaricated.

She suddenly stopped, swinging about and viewing
me with open suspicion.

"Where'd yuh ever know that Latreille guy?" she
demanded.

"Latreille worked with me, for months," I declared,
speaking with more truth, in fact, than I had intended.

"Then me for the tall timber!" announced that hard-
faced little adventuress as she began to scramble into
her clothes.

"Don't you want me to get you a taxi?" I inquired,
backing discreetly away until I stood in the open door.

"Taxi nuttin' !" she retorted through the shower of
soiled lingerie that cascaded about her writhing white
shoulders. "What d'yuh take me for, anyway? A
ostrich ? When I get under cover, I go there me own
way, and not wit' all Brooklyn bawlin' me out !"

And she went her own way. She went, indeed,
much more expeditiously than I had anticipated, for in
five minutes' time she was dressed and booted and
hatted and scurrying off through the now darkened
streets. Which trail she took and what cover she

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 337

sought didn't in the least interest me once I had made
sure of the fact she was faring in an opposite direction
to Mickey's thirst-appeasing caravansary. But she
went. She shook the dust of that house off her febrile
young heels; and that was the one thing I desired of
her. For that night, I knew, still held a problem or
two for me which would be trying enough without the
presence of the redoubtable Lady Babbie and her san-
guinary bicuspid.

Yet once she was clear of that house, I decided to
follow her example. This, however, was not so easy
as it had promised to be. For I had scarcely reached
the foot of the stairway when I heard the sound of
voices outside the street door. And I promptly rec-
ognized them as Crotty's and Latreille's.

That discovery sent me groping hurriedly backward
into the darkened hallway. By the time the door
opened I had felt my way to a second flight of steps
which obviously led to the basement. I could hear
the voice of the man known as The Doc, for the three
men were now advancing, and advancing none too
quietly, into their musty-aired harborage. But my
own flight down those basement stairs was quiet
enough, for I realized now the expediency of slipping
away and putting in a call for help.

It was only after a good deal of groping about, how-
ever, that I was able to reach the door opening on the
basement-area, directly under the street-steps. A huge
brass key, fortunately, stood in place there. So as I
passed out I took the trouble to relock that door after
me and pocket the key.

338 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

In five minutes I had found a side-street grocery-
store with a sufficiently sequestered telephone. And
by means of this telephone I promptly called up Head-
quarters and asked for Lieutenant Belton.

He listened to what I had to say with much more
interest than I had anticipated.

"Witter," he called back over the wire, "I believe
you've stumbled across something big."

"Then supposing you stumble over here after it,"
was my prompt suggestion. But Belton wasn't to be
stampeded into the over-hasty action of the amateur.

"If that isn't that bunch Headquarters has been want-
ing to interview for the last three months, I miss my
one best bet. But in this business, Witter, you've got
to know. So I'll slip over to the Bureau and look up
mugs and records. If that faint-spiller is Bad Nadeau,
alias Car- Step Sadie, there's no doubt about your man
being Crotty."

"She is Car-Step Sadie," I told him.

"Then we'll be out there with bells on," he calmly
announced.

"But what do you expect me to do, in the mean-
time?" I somewhat peevishly demanded.

"Just keep 'em guessing," he tranquilly retorted,
"keep 'em guessing until we amble over there and take
'em off your hands !"

That was easy enough to say, I remembered as I
made my way back to Crotty's broken-faced abode, but
the problem of holding that unsavory trio in subjec-
tion didn't impress me as an over-trivial one. Yet I
went back with a new fortitude stiffening my back-

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 339

bone, for I knew that whatever might happen that
night, I now had the Law on my side.

That casual little flicker of confidence, however, was
not destined to sustain me for long. A new compli-
cation suddenly confronted me. For as I guardedly
approached the house from which I'd sent Bab Nadeau
scampering off into the night I noticed the Nile-green
car already drawn up close beside the curb. And this
car, I further noticed, was empty.

So it was with a perceptibly quickened pulse that I
sidled down into the unclean area, unearthed my brass
key, and let myself silently into the unlighted base-
ment. Then I just as quietly piloted my way in
through the darkness, found the stairway, and as-
cended to the ground floor.

The moment I reached the hallway I could hear the
sound of voices through a door on my left. I could
hear Mary Lockwood's voice, and then the throaty
tones of that opianic old impostor known as The Doc.

. . . "No doubt of the fact at all, my dear
young lady. The spine has been injured, very seri-
ously injured. Whether or not it will result in paraly-
sis I can't tell until I consult with my colleague, Doctor
Emmanuel Paschall. But we must count on the poor
girl being helpless for life, Crotty, helpless for life!"

This was followed by a moment or two of silence.
And I could imagine what that moment or two was
costing Mary Lockwood.

"But I want to see the girl," she said in a somewhat
desperate voice. "I must see her."

"All in good time, my dear, all in good time," te**!-

34o THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

porized her bland old torturer. This was followed by
a lower mumble of voices from which I could glean
nothing intelligible. But those three conspirators must
have consulted together, for after a moment of silence
I caught the sound of steps crossing the floor.

"He'll just slip up and make sure the patient can be
seen," I heard the suave old rascal intone. And I had
merely time to edge back and dodge about the base-
ment stairhead as the room-door was flung open and
Latreille stepped out in the hall. The door closed again
as he vanished above-stairs.

When he returned, he didn't step back into the room,
but waited outside and knocked on the closed door.
This brought old Crotty out in answer to the sum-
mons. Just what passed between that worthy trio,
immured in their whispering consultation in that half-
lighted hallway, failed to reach my ears. But this in
no way disturbed me, for I knew well enough that La-
treille had at least passed on to them the alarming
news that their much needed patient was no longer
under that roof. And what was more, I knew that
this discovery would serve to bring things to a some-
what speedier climax than we had all anticipated. There
was a sort of covert decisiveness about their move-
ments, in fact, as they stepped back into the room and
swung the door shut behind them. So I crept closer,
listening intently. But it was only patches and shreds
of their talk that I could overhear. I caught enough,
however, to know they were protesting that their
patient was too weak to be interviewed. I could hear
Crotty feelingly exclaim that it wasn't kind words

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 341

which could help this poor child now, but only some-
thing much more substantial, and much more mun-
dane.

"\res, it's only money that can talk in a case like
this," pointedly concurred The Doc, clearly spurred
on to a more open baldness of advance. And there
were further parleyings and arguments and lugubrious
enumerations of possibilities from the man of medi-
cine. I knew well enough what they were doing. They
were conjointly and cunningly brow-beating and intim-
idating that solitary girl who, even while she must
have gathered some inkling of their worldliness, com-
prehended nothing of the wider plot they were weaving
about her. And I further knew that they were winning
their point, for I could hear her stifled little gasp of
final surrender.

"Very well," her strained voice said. 'Til give you
the check."

This pregnant sentence was followed by an equally
pregnant silence. Then came a series of small noises,
among which I could distinguish the scrape of a
chair-leg and steps crossing the floor. And I surmised
that Mary was seating herself at a desk or table, to
make out and sign the precious little slip of paper
which they were so unctuously conspiring for. So it
was at this precise moment that I decided to interfere.

I opened the door, as quietly as I could, and stepped
into the room.

It was Latreille who first saw me. The other two
men were too intently watching the girl at the desk.
They were still watching her as she slowly rose from

342 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

her chair, with a blue-tinted oblong of paper between
her fingers. And at the same moment that Mary Lock-
wood stood up Latreille did the same. He rose slowly,
with his eyes fixed on my face, backing just as slowly
away as he continued to stare at me. But that retreat,
I very promptly realized, wasn't prompted by any sense
of fear.

"Mary," I called out sharply to the girl who still
stood staring down at the slip of blue paper.

She looked up as she heard that call, peering at me
with half incredulous and slightly startled eyes. I
don't know whether she was glad or sorry to see me
there. Perhaps it was both. But she neither moved
nor spoke.

"Mary," I cried out to her, "don't give that up !"

I moved toward her, but she in turn moved away
from me until she stood close beside the ever watchful
Latreille.

"This is something which you don't understand,"
she said, much more calmly than I had expected.

"But I do," I hotly contended.

"It's something which you can't possibly under-
stand," she repeated in tones which threw a gulf yawn-
ing between us.

"But it's you who don't," I still tried to tell her.
"These three here are claim fakers ; nothing but crimi-
nals. They're bleeding you! They're blackmailing
you!"

A brief but portentous silence fell on that room as
the bewildered girl looked from one face to the other.
But it lasted only a moment. The tableau was sud-

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 343

denly broken by a movement from Latreille. And it
was a quick and cat-like movement. With one sweep
of the hand he reached out and snatched the oblong of
blue paper from Mary Lockwood's fingers. And as I
beheld that movement a little alarm-gong somewhere
up at the peak of my brain went off with a clang.
Some remote cave-man ancestor of mine stirred in his
grave. I saw red.

With one unreasoned and unreasoning spring I
reached Latreille, crying to the girl as I went : "Get
out of this house ! Get out — quick !"

That was all I said. It was all I had a chance to
say, for Latreille was suddenly taking up all my atten-
tion. That sauve brigand, instead of retreating, caught
and held the slip of paper between his teeth and squared
for combat. And combat was what he got.

We struck and countered and clenched and went to
the floor together, still striking blindly at each other's
faces as we threshed and rolled about there. We sent
a chair spinning, and a table went over like a nine-
pin. We wheezed and gasped and clumped against the
baseboard and flopped again out into open space. Yet
I tore that slip of paper from between Latreille's teeth,
and macerated it between my own, as we continued to
pound and thump and writhe about the dusty floor.
And I think I would have worsted Latreille, if I'd been
given half a chance, for into that onslaught of mine
went the pent-up fury of many weeks and months
of self-corroding hate. 'But that worthy known as The
Doc deemed it wise to take a hand in the struggle. His
interference assumed the form of a blow with a chair-

344 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

back, a blow which must have stunned me for a mo-
ment or two, for when I was able to think clearly again
Latreille had me pinned down, with one knee on my
chest and old Crotty stationed at the door with a Colt
revolver in his hand. The next moment Latreille
forced my wrists down in front of me, jerked a hand-
kerchief from my pocket, and with it tied my crossed
hands close together. Then he turned and curtly mo-
tioned to Crotty.

"Here," he commanded. "Bring that gun and guard
this pin-head! If he tries anything, let him have it,
and have it good !"

Slowly and deliberately Latreille rose to his feet.
He paused for a moment to wipe the blood and dust
from his face. Then he turned to Mary Lock wood,
who stood with her back against the wall and her tightly
clenched fists pressed close to her sides. She was very
white, white to the lips. But it wasn't fear that held
her there. It was a sort of colorless heat of indigna-
tion, a fusing of rage and watchfulness which she
seemed at a loss to express in either word or action.

"Now you," barked out Latreille, motioning her to
the desk, "make good on that paper. And do it quick !"

Mary surveyed him, silently, studiously, deliberately.
He was, apparently, something startlingly new in her
career, something which she seemed unable to fathom.
But he'd by no means intimidated her. For, instead of
answering him, she spoke to me.

"Witter," she called out, watching her enemy as she
spoke. "Witter, what do you want me to do?"

I remembered Lieutenant Belton and his message. I

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 345

remembered my own helplessness, and the character of
the men confronting us. And I remembered that time
was a factor in Mary's favor and mine.

"Do what he tells you," I called up to her. And I
knew that she had stepped slowly across to the desk
again. Yet what she did there I failed to understand,
for my attention was once more centered on the old
scoundrel covering me with the Colt revolver and re-
peatedly and blasphemously threatening to plug me
through the heart if I so much as made one finger-move
to get off that floor. So I lay there studying him. I
studied his posture. I studied the position of his
weapon. I studied my own length of limb. I studied
the furniture overturned about the room. And then I
once more studied old Crotty.

Then I laughed aloud. As I did so I suddenly
twisted my head and stared toward the door.

"Smash it in, Sam!" I shouted exultantly, and with
all the strength of my lungs.

It startled them all, as I had intended it should. But
it also did something else which I had expected it to
do. It caused Crotty to glance quickly over his shoul-
der toward the door in question. And at the precise
moment that he essayed this movement I ventured one
of my own.

I brought my outstretched leg up, in one quick and
vicious kick. I brought my boot-sole in one stinging
blow against the stock of the firearm and the fingers
clustered about it. And the result was practically what
I had anticipated. It sent the revolver cascading up
into the air, like a circus-tumbler doing a double-twister

346 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

over an elephant's back. There was the bark of an
exploding cartridge as it went. But I had both timed
and placed its fall, and before either one of that startled
couple could make a move I had given a quick twist
and roll along the dusty floor and caught up the fallen
weapon in my own pinioned right hand. Another
quick wrench and twist freed my bound wrist, and
before even a second shout of warning could escape
from any of them I was on my feet with the revolver
balanced in my right hand and fire in my eye.

"Back up, every one o' you," I commanded. For I
was hot now, hot as a hornet. And if one of that
worthy trio had ventured a move not in harmony with
my orders I am morally certain that I should have sent
a bullet through him. They too must have been equally
assured of my determination, for side by side they
backed away, with their hands slightly above their
heads, like praying Brahmans, until the wall itself
stopped their retreat.

"Stand closer," I told them. And they shuffled and
side-stepped shoulder to shoulder, ludicrously, like the
rawest of rookies on their first day of drill. As I
stood contemplating them, with disgust on my face, I
was interrupted by the voice of Mary.

"Witter," she demanded in a voice throaty with ex-
citement yet not untouched with some strange exul-
tation which I couldn't take time to analyze, "what
shall I do this time?"

I couldn't turn and face her, for I still had to keep
that unsavory trio under inspection.

"I want you to go down to your car," I told her

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 347

over my shoulder, "and get in it, and then go straight
home. And then — "

"That's absurd," she interrupted.

"I want you to do it."

"'But I don't intend to," she said, ignoring my mas-
terfulness.

"Why?"

"I've been too cowardly about this already. It's
been quite bad enough, without leaving you here like
that. So be good enough to tell me what I can do."

I liked her for that, and I was on the point of tell-
ing her so, when down below I heard the quick stamp
and clump of feet. And I felt in my bones that it
must be Belton and his men. Then I remembered
Mary and her question.

"I'll tell you what you can do," I said, pointing to-
ward Latreille. "You can ask this man what it was
I ran down in my car last Hallow-e'en."

She was moving forward, with a face quite without
fear by this time. But her brow clouded, at that speech
of mine, and she came to a sudden stop.

"I don't need to ask him," she slowly acknowledged.

"Why not?"

"Because I know already."

"He told you?" I demanded, with a vicious and
quite involuntary jab of my barrel-end into one of
Latreille's intercostal spaces.

"Not directly," replied the ever-truthful Mary. "But
it was through him that I found out. I know now it
was through him."

"I thought so," I snorted. "And through him you're

348 THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

now going to find out that he was a liar and a slanderer.
So be good enough to explain to her, Latreille, that it
was a straw-stuffed dummy we ran down, a street-
crowd's scare-crow, and nothing else!"

Latreille didn't answer me. He merely stood there
with studious and half-closed eyes, a serpent-like squint
of venom on his colorless face. It was, in fact, old
Crotty who broke the silence.

"We'll do our talkin', young fellow, when the right
time comes. And when we do, you're goin' to pay for
an outrage like this, for an unprovoked assault on de-
cent citizens!"

"Well, the time's come right now," I promptly an-
nounced, for I had caught the sound of Belton's quick
step on the stairs. And the next moment the door
swung open and that stalwart officer stood staring in-
tently yet cautiously about the corner of the jamb. He
stood there squinting in, in fact, for several seconds,
calmly inspecting each face and factor of the situa-
tion. It wasn't until he stepped in through the open
door, however, that I noticed the ugly-looking service-
revolver in his own right hand.

'That's the bunch we want, all right," proclaimed the
officer of law and order as he turned back to the still
open door. "Come up, boys, and take 'em down," he
called cheerfully and companionably out through the
darkness.

Mary, at the answering tumult of those quick-thump-
ing feet, crept a little closer to my side. Alarm, I sup-
pose, had at last seeped through and crumbled the last
of her Lockwood pride. The flash of waiting firearms,

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 349

the strange faces, the still stranger experiences of that
nieht, seemed to have brought about some final and
unlooked for subjugation of her spirit. At least, so 1

thought.

"Couldn't you take me away, Witter?" she asked a
little weakly and also a little wistfully. Yet there was
something about the very tone of her voice which
sent a thrill through my tired body. And that thrill
gave me boldness enough to reach out a proprietory
arm and let the weight of her body rest against it.

"You won't want us, will you, Belton?" I demanded,
and that long-legged young officer stared about at us
abstractedly, for a moment or two, before replying.
When he turned away he did so to hide what seemed
to be a slowly widening smile.

"These are the folks I want," he retorted, with a
hand-wave toward his three prisoners. And without
wasting further breath or time on them I helped Mary
out and down to the Nile-green roadster.

"No; let me," she said as she noticed my movement
to mount to the driver's seat. But she was silent for
several minutes as we threaded our way out through
the quiet and shadowy streets.

"Witter," she said at last and with a gulp, "you
must think I'm an — an awful coward."

"/ was the coward," I proclaimed out of my sudden
misery of mind. For there were certain things which
would be terribly hard to forget.

"You?" she cried. "After what I've just seen?
After what you've saved me from ? Oh, how you must
despise me!"

35o THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP

"No," I said with a gulp of my own. "That's not
the word."

"It's not," she absently agreed.

"It's not," I repeated, "for I love you!"

She made no response to that foolish and untimely
declaration. All her attention, in fact, seemed directed
toward her driving.

"But I was so cowardly in that other thing," she
persisted, out of this second silence. "Judging without
understanding, condemning something I was only too
ready to do myself !"

"And it made you hate me ?"

"No — no. I hate myself!" And her gesture was
one of protest, passionate protest.

"'But you must have hated me."

"Witter," she said, speaking quite low and leaning
a little closer to the wheel as she spoke, as though all
her thoughts were on the shadowy road ahead of her,
"I never hated you — never! I couldn't even make
myself."

"Why?" I asked, scarcely knowing I had spoken.

"Because I've always loved you" she said in a whis-
per, big with bravery. And I heard a silvery little bell
begin to ring in my heart, like a bird in an orchard,
heralding spring.

"Stop the car!" I suddenly commanded, once the
real, the glorious meaning of those six words of Mary's
had sunk through to that strange core of things we
call our Soul.

"What for?" demanded Mary, mechanically releas-
ing the clutch and throwing the brake-pedal down.

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER 351

She sat staring startled into my face as we came to a

stop. "What for?" she repeated.

"Because we must never run anything- down again,"

I solemnly informed her.

"But I don't see," she began, "why — "

"It's because I'm going to kiss you, my beloved," I

said as I reached out for her. "And something tells

me, Mary, that it's going to be a terribly long one!"

THE END

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PS Stringer, Arthur John

8537 Arbuthnott

TS45M3 The man who couldn't sleep

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